Macopinion

The More Wondrous Machine? - From The Road Warrior Archive

A thin, indeed empty, mailbag last week so in lieu, here's another rearview from The Road Warrior Archive - a think piece first published on The Road Warrior July 9, 2002, about computers and productivity, although I should have said creativity as well.

I'm always pleased when reading something I wrote years ago when it holds up well over time, and this one does I think. I'm probably even more computer integrated in my work today than I was five years ago, and I surely do not have any more free time. So without further adieu, here's:


The More Wondrous Machine? - From The Road Warrior Archive [July 9, 2002]

It's kind of an unlikely turn of events that finds me making part of my living writing about computers. As a kid, I was never an electronics or technology buff. I was more into cars and boats, and a bit of a Luddite even in those categories. I wasn't into amateur radio, had only a casual passing interest in science fiction, and found the passion some of my friends expressed for Star Trek a bit, well, odd.

I remember sometime in the mid to late '70s when one of my Trekkie friends got hold of what must have been a pretty high end Texas Instruments calculator. He was totally stoked. "You can program this thing" he enthused, delightedly. My response was more or less a polite yawn.

A couple of years later some of my friends started messing around with the very early consumer personal computers. Again I was nonplussed. They seemed like an expensive and complicated platform for playing video games on, and I never cared much for video games. The fascination escaped me. I couldn't figure out what a personal computer could actually be useful for. Balancing my checkbook?

The first time I actually used a computer must have been in 1983 or 1984. I was part owner of a small sail yacht dealership, and my business partner, whose day job was as a mainframe programmer for a large international tire manufacturing firm, decided that we should computerize our bookkeeping. He bought some sort of primitive PC with a crude dot matrix printer and a cassette tape data drive. You could type on this thing, and it could do math, but it seemed a lot more trouble than it was worth. My old Remington manual typewriter and Radio Shack pocket calculator were quicker and more efficient for what we needed to do, and the Remington turned out better looking hard copy. I wasn't impressed.

I got out of the boat business in the mid-'80s, and became a full-time writer - at least as full-time as I could manage, markets-wise. I continued to hammer away on the old Remington, until my cousin, who is also a computer programmer, asked me if I would like one of the Wang word processors his company was retiring to replace with IBM PCs. Never one to pass up a freebie, I accepted his offer. That Wang was (is, I still have it) even larger than the PC rig my boat business partner had bought, standing nearly 3 ft. tall, not counting the monochrome CRT monitor. It had a daisy-wheel printer, that turned out much nicer copy then my buddy's awful dot matrix unit, and incorporated two disk drives that ran 5 1/4" floppies, one for the System Disk and the other for the data archive desk.

That Wang was of course a revelation. It had a very nice, menu-driven, word-processing program with short command line prompts which worked a bit like Mac Finder menus without the GUI. I still find it quite intuitive and pleasant to use when I occasionally fire it up. The facility to cut, paste, copy, and otherwise edit text on screen finally convinced me that yes, computers could be practically useful. My productivity increased overnight. The Wang could also do math. Shazam.

However, the publishing world was rapidly computerizing, and the Wang wasn't very compatible. Most of my editors were using Macs, and my main market in the early 1990's, a publisher of several marine-oriented magazines, was a big Macintosh fan and booster. He wanted me to get a Mac so that I could submit articles and artwork on disk. A university professor friend of mine wanted to sell his Mac Plus rig complete with ImageWriter printer, and, well, the rest is history, Here I am, writing on the Mac Web.

What sparked this reverie was contemplating my WallStreet PowerBook the other day as an object rather than as a tool that I'm working with and generally take for granted without thinking about it too much conceptually. I was carrying it outdoors at the time, out of its usual workstation environment, and it occurred to me how amazing it is that in just a bit more than a decade, computers have gone from being, at least in my perception, a gadget that seemed to have little practical relevance, to the facilitator and repository of a substantial - perhaps even alarming - proportion of my activities.

My PowerBooks are now the principal tool with which I make my living, having displaced my typewriters and the word processor, and my complete journalistic work output from the last 10 years is archived on their hard drives, readily available for reference at any time. The computers are also my principal tools of communication, having displaced for the most part letter mail, fax, and much telephoning, (and even fax messages are now sent and received with the computers). They have displaced the public library and to a large extent my own private reference book collection as my main avenue of research, via the Internet, and I also have three encyclopedias on CD-ROM or DVD.

I now do most of my banking and a fair bit of bill-paying with the computers, and also derive most of my investment information from the Internet - my local newspaper no longer even publishes daily mutual fund closing prices at all.

Most of my music listening is done on the computers these days. My dabbling in photography - once one of my main hobbies - is increasingly focused on the computer screen. My film photofinisher even puts photos I get developed on their Website for download, and with a digital camera, film now gets dialed out of the equation entirely some of the time. A lot of my newspaper and magazine reading his also now online.

This little machine has, in short, gone from being a curiosity to being indispensable. PowerBooks are appropriately named. It still amazes me that so much power and potential can be packed into something this small. The compactness of my first PowerBook, a 5300, blew me away back in 1996, my current WallStreet and Pismo are a bit bigger than the 5300, but they're still amazing.

However, all this has a downside. It concerns me a bit that I've become this dependent on the machine. It allows me to get a lot more done, but I don't seem to have any more free time - indeed the opposite obtains. Days seem shorter than they ever did, and I always seem to be scrambling to catch up. While email and Internet access to information are supposed to be time savers, the fact is that they have expanded our potential reach - and the reach of others to connect with us - to the extent that they have become net time-burners.

The powerful computer has ratcheted up our expectations of ourselves, so that no matter how much we accomplish in a day, we - or at least I - tend to feel that I could've done more.

Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the PowerBooks and the window/connection with the rest of the world that they provide, as well as of course being the tools of my trade. Email is a wonderful communication facilitator, and it, for instance, allows me to keep in touch with my flown-the-nest children at a level that would not have been possible in pre-computer days. That's worth a lot. I just wonder if, in the greater scheme of things, we really are all that much better off because of computers.

One of the great conundrums for me is the tremendous creative productivity of so many artists, musicians, writers, intellectuals, and scientists of the pre-technology era--The polymaths and Renaissance men (and women) who excelled in some cases in what would be half a dozen or more highly specialized fields in today's context, and this in the days before electronic communication, recorded music, or even typewriters, and, perhaps most amazingly, electric lights. The output of some of these people was astounding - monstrous oeuvres of novels and poems, all handwritten; vast collections of chamber music and orchestral works, insightful treatises on philosophy; expansive diaries; thousands of letters; and scientific exploration and experimentation in multiple fields.

I keep wondering if I might not have been much more productive, at least in a substantive, a lasting sense, were it not for all the conveniences distracting me.


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cmoore@macopinion.com


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