The New Old Way Of Doing Things

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100_4184.JPGGosh bless my friend and co-conspirator in my band Spudlok, Bill. When we moved out of our mom's houses to a joint near supermall Ohio, we were all set. Out of all the noise of still living with our moms and into independent apartment living. We had a party pad. Come and go as we pleased. No hassles. No chores. Har Har Har. Moving in together was the only way we could afford to move out. We were both part timers or minimum wagers working at our dream media gigs. Bill in television and myself in radio.

Back in the summer of 1986, I knew what I must do. I started writing. Lots. I also absorbed that entire summer of David Letterman which I taped most of and hold those tapes in high regard. Come on, he interviewed Max Headroom. He had the book lady, the guy under the stairs, and "GET INTO THE FOUNTAIN!" He groped Sandra Berndhart sitting in his lap. I wrote and I wrote and wrote and before it was through, had four "teen aged" books, all which somehow involved the main character becoming a dog or a wolf. I knew I could never get anything done with long hand chicken scratch so I needed a way to get my stories in a printable format. Bill had an Apple Mac with the floppy and built in monitor. He allowed me to type out my first book and begin editing it. "Whoa Whoa Whoa, stop the clock."  When did what is in the picture come in? Well, that was after I started writing but before I had access to a "modern" computer. Read on... or go look for porn. I don't care.

100_4186.JPGMy memory failed me as to when I first got this device. It's a Smith Corona PWP-77D word processor. They were popular as hell until the computer/printer became so cheap to own. Back when I got this, I think you were still at $3000 for even a cheaper computer/inkjet printer to word process in letter quality. This came along, wasn't their most expensive, but was their cheapest with removable "media". That way, I could type in one of my novels and then print it out and have it at least be good quality. Now, I had an Atari 800XL with a cheap "printer-plotter", but it printed on calculator paper. Later I got a genuine "letter quality" printer, but it used a drum with about 10 letters on each reel. That meant, typing out a full page of writing took about five minutes and you could only get about 2 pages without the printer needing to cool down for 10 minutes. I never got the Atari dot matrix printer.

100_4187.JPGThis device was a cool three hunny. I bought it from my local office supply house. Actually, it was quite advanced for what it was. You could use it like a normal typewriter and even buy print cartridges for it with an erase feature. I suppose the lower models with smaller screens or no screen would need that. No, I planned on only printing when I had my document edited and ready to print. So, this was a good typewriter. As a text editor, it was fair to midland. Computers had just broken the 133MHZ speed limit or so when this unit came out, and those would cost a billion dollars. I'm sure this had a faster processor than my 64K speed monster Atari 800XL but I can't imagine if this had more than 4 or 8 MHZ processing power.  You could get a spreadsheet program for it, so It must have been a little more advanced. It seemed like early DOS and had maybe 16-32K built in memory? It doesn't give the specs in the manual. If I could open a whole 160 page document, I think it kept reading chunks from the disk drive while I attempted to edit. That was a major problem on a longer document. No mouse to get to where you wanted, just arrow keys. When you deleted a line, then it needed to process the change so sometimes the display would go blank for a few seconds while it fit your changes into the screen. Ahh, but they were there. It typed out what you had and was designed to do it without 10 minute rest periods. Of course, it would idle each page it printed until you put in the next piece of paper. Yeah, the more expensive models had a auto feed and a bigger display, but for $300, I had THE POWER!

100_4188.JPG...and I'm so glad I splurged with my then small balance credit card to get one with a disk drive. It was a 720 Meg drive, but it really gave me the editing strength to type in stuff and work on fixing it later. I had floppies for each "book" I had. Plus, because it was a "DOS" like product, it came with a "conversion" program, whereas, if I switched to a PC product, I could convert the files and roll on from there with 66MHZ or better speed and Word Perfect goodness. Yes, I did type three of my four projects in with this typewriter. Of course, when I tried to edit my first project, um... it was... um... forget it. Again, editing a longer project was not impossible on this machine, but also not very practical. So, when I got access to Bill's mac, I had some conversion to do.

His Mac had software to convert from PC to Mac, so I had to find a PC to use to convert files from Smith Corona over to PC. Enter the fine peeps over at the radio station I worked overnight at. WWWE. I ran the Rush Limbaugh program replay, on a really big and slow reel to reel tape "pancake" from 3am to 6am. Yes, I had to get in and out of commercials and live news and run the ship during this time. It seems to primitive to think that I had a job running a tape late at night but it was 1994... I could use Rush's first 22 minute segment to start converting files with an unused computer and convert I did. One night, I made the mistake of turning off the computer when I was done. Unfortunately, that loused up the entire system. I remember that I didn't know I had borked the whole station until the morning host came on and said that they didn't have show prep because someone messed with the computers, maybe someone writing "the great American novel". When I realized that it was me, I went to a nearby doughnut shop, bought a dozen, and went back up to the station as an apology. At least I didn't get canned. Thank goodness by that time I was adding to a few live shows by doing creative bits for them, so I was a bit more valuable than a tape jockey.

100_4190.JPGThis is obligatory of course. I knew the display would be hard to take a picture of with a flash, so this is what I got. Once I had editing and printing capability, I did so with Bill's Mac and gave him some money for the ink and paper. I finished typing my third project and even put it in a book because I thought it was the most likely story that could go some place. Of course, as I read what I thought was the finished edit, I found a thousand edits more. Soon after typing my fourth project in, I got the gig in Toledo and said good bye to the Mac world. It would be a few more years until I moved to Louisville and Boomer The Dog gave me a Okidata 9 Pin dot matrix printer until I had the printing tech again. Until then, I went to Kinkos or Office Max to type resumes and print them. I don't think this got much use after that. Maybe the occasional typing a letter, but that was it. I still have it and it still works. Maybe I should type something....nahhhhhhhhh. $5 at a thrift store. I'll keep mine as a boat anchor for my junk pile thank you very much.

-Ric