Once More With Footnotes

only up to our knees and we're not used to living in it, so we're trying and discarding ideas very quickly. Reading books off a screen? It doesn't seem to work for us. But electronic paper is already out there. Maybe you'd like just one bo o k on your shelf, that looks and feels just like a book, but which could be any one of a thousand titles chosen from the little keypad on the back? That's still apeman thinking. There's nascent technologies out there that could give us the power of gods — at least, some of the more homely ones.
     
                  In the movie, the apeman throws the bone up into the air and it never comes down. Lucky for him. We've been throwing lots of bones into the air and they've been dropping all over the place, often where we can't see th em until too late, and too often on other people. The tide is rising — literally, this time. More and more people are trying to occupy less and less ground. We're not killing off the planet. It has recovered from worse catastrophes than us. But the bones ar e coming back down with a vengeance, and we may not survive being not quite intelligent enough.
     
                  Shorn of the spaceships, the message in the movie is as relevant here as it was in that other future: what the apemen really need to do now is learn to become human. It would be a good idea to learn really fast, don't you think?
     

This was written for the UK Society of Authors' publication The Electronic Author, Summer 1993 number, when the world of word-processing was still a closed bo- file to many members.
     
    Not a lot has really changed. The main computer is now a high-end Pentium 4 with three 18" screens. Is it fast? No. New machines are never faster, they just make your old machine go slower. I still use WordPerfect 4.2, except that it's really a heavily mo d ified version of WordPerfect 11, with the keyboard commands now those of the old DOS programme. But I still fail to use 90% of its features. Now, though, I fail to use them much faster.
     
     
     
     
     
H igh T ech, W hy T ech?
     
                  I did my first word-processing on a Sin clair ZX81 computer. (Pause for a Pythonesque chorus from older computer users: "Luxury! When I were a lad, we 'ad to do our computin' on a MANIAC-60, it weighed 16 ton, took oop three floors, and could only do one sentence at a time ...")
     
                  Yes, but it wa s the first one I could afford. It was about as small as a computer could be without being a pocket calculator. But, if you bought enough wobbly additional bits, including a tiny little printer which printed on rolls of aluminiumised paper, and you plugge d it into the TV, and you worked very slowly, and prayed a lot, and copied everything out on a real typewriter afterwards, you could word-process. If you didn't mind working only in capital letters ...
     
                  You could say I was committed to the idea of word-pro cessing. After all, I'd grown up reading science fiction. This was the future, and you had to make it work. I felt that, somehow, if I tried hard enough, I'd finally get it to do what I wanted. Or, recalling the teething troubles of that first little plast ic rectangle which hung off the television like a prolapse, at least to do something.
     
                  That was in the Iron Age of personal computing, eleven years ago. I won't bore you with the techno-talk about the machine I'm using now. It's big and it's fast and I pr obably don't use a tenth of its capabilities.
     
                  The tendency is to become messianic, to enthuse at the ease of editing, the mutability of every sentence. Well, yes. The word-processor offers all that. I find it as natural as a pencil and paper — it was the t ypewriter that used to be a distraction, with the clanking and sticking ribbons and constant need for feeding. This machine doesn't get in the way.
     
                  I write using WordPerfect version 4.2, now superseded in the marketplace by bigger, swisher versions which in my informed opinion offer nothing extra for your average writer. I happened to take to WordPerfect because I could pick it up as I went along, and it presents the user with a large invitingly blank screen with just a tactful reminder, down in one corn e r, that it is there. But I might just as easily have started out using Word or WordStar. They all do pretty much the same things