Writing Technology: Then and Now

I’ve always been a writer. Writing saw me through high school and my ability helped me succeed in college. We’re talking nearly 60 years since I graduated from high school in 1962.

Recently, I heard a line (see the above meme) in a movie (or maybe it was a TV show) about technology. I was reminded of how technology continuously advances, and how it constantly changes us and our ways of life — writing in particular.

Then

No, I don’t plan to go way back and talk about stone carving or quill-writing on parchment. Instead, let’s talk about how what I wrote appeared in print when I first started doing it professionally, working on a newspaper in Los Angeles.

Back in the late ‘60s, we typed our stories on a manual typewriter and gave it to the editor who pencil-edited it, extensively at first, until my writing skills improved. He sent it down a pneumatic tube; the next time I saw it was when the newspaper came out.

A few years later, when I became an editor at a neighborhood weekly, I got more involved in the process — still used a manual typewriter, did my own editing, and sent it to our print shop. I got to see the words transformed into lead type on a Linotype machine, arranged in a frame (a “chase”), then rolled around the shop on a “turtle.”

Later

Manual typewriters were prevalent, until I opened my own public relations/advertising business in 1972. I bought an IBM Selectric, the one with changeable font balls and correctable ribbons. I used it for years until I relocated and added a personal computer (PC) that used 8-inch floppy discs. That PC was retired when I joined a start-up PR agency and graduated to one with an internal hard disc.

We were bought by the largest ad agency in town, and I had to convert to an Apple Macintosh. I then became a professor at the University of Hawai’i. Our department used PCs, but my class writing labs used Macs. That was fun.

I returned to the PR/Ad agency (they made an offer I couldn’t refuse), then after a few years opened my one-man public relations strategic counseling business from home. I bought a desktop PC and a laptop to take with me on business trips.

Now

Retiring in 2006, I’m now an Apple iPad Pro user, a one-finger word-processing writer on the screen’s keyboard. If I have a lot of writing, which is rare since I retired, I have a Kensington keyboard that is compatible with my older iPad Air.

About the only writing I do is here on my Left Field Wander blog. I used to have 9 (NINE!) blogs, but lost my mojo for keeping up with constant updating.

I’ve kept up with writing technology, and have realized that my “Now” period is missing one thing — human interaction. I used to be able to talk through my creativity with my editors, and later with office colleagues. That hasn’t happened since I’ve been independent.

But you know what? We learn to accept and adapt, and it all works out eventually.