Essay by Ed Quillen
Modern Life – February 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I knew guys who loved to work on their cars. They spent so much time on their cars that they seldom had time to drive anywhere, and often, their cars were in various states of assembly and disassembly which meant they couldn’t be driven anyway. As hobbies go, that’s no worse than many and better than some, but it rather defeats the whole purpose of the car: to get you from one place to another.
I find it easy to fall into the same trap, though, except not with cars. Computers seem to be my unproductive pursuit. Many days I spend much more time tinkering with the computer than in productive work like writing. Or the research behind the writing, or the office scutwork like bookkeeping that comes with writing.
In other words, the computer is supposed to help me do my work, not become my work, and it’s something of a trap. It’s as if you forgot that you needed to keep your house warm in the winter, but still maintained a woodpile and stove. The stove would be nicely blacked with a sparkling clean flue, the wood would be stacked quite neatly, the saw teeth razor sharp, and the splitting maul stored under cover with a fine edge. And every day, you’d work to preserve and enhance those conditions, without bothering with the messy task of burning the wood. The tools become more important than the job they’re supposed to do.
And so I write this, trying to focus on words, while a goodly part of my mind is musing about an Ethernet print server that just arrived. It’s got three parallel ports, and if I can get it working it should solve a problem with our three shared printers in this shop.
As it is, they’re all connected to one computer (our “server”) that is on all the time. The computer has only one parallel port for connecting a printer, and so you need to turn a manual switchbox to select the printer you want to use. It’s easy to forget to do this, especially when you’re in another room, and so the Epson Stylus Color 600 might be getting the printer commands that are supposed to go to an HP6L or the old Okidata M92 dot-matrix that prints the occasional mailing label. The result can be a time-consuming mess, as well as a waste of paper and toner, ink, or ribbon.
Some time ago, I bought a card that was supposed to add two parallel ports to the computer, but I never could get it to work properly. No matter how carefully I installed it and its driver software, the computer often froze when I tried to print to one of the added parallel ports.
After asking technically competent friends and nosing around the Internet, I learned that an Ethernet print server should solve my problem. Just plug it into our Local Area Network, attach the printers, run the installation software, and those printers should be available from any computer in our shop, with no risk of sending data to the wrong printer.
But this magazine’s deadline looms, and so I need to be writing, rather than fiddling with computers.
THERE WAS A TIME, about 15 years ago, when I could do both almost simultaneously, because I wrote for several computer magazines, and my fiddling and tinkering was part of the research for the articles, which ranged from an assembly-language tutorial to a how-to piece on hot-rodding a Kaypro PC by replacing the Intel 8088 CPU with an NEC V20 chip and then installing a faster clock crystal.
But back then, computers seemed simpler. Maybe they weren’t as easy to use as the modern machines with their “point and click” graphical user interfaces, but they were easier to understand. They didn’t do so much for you, like automatically capitalizing words — words that you may not have wanted to capitalize.
Ever since I read about computers when I was a kid, I wanted one. Martha’s father sold them for a variety of companies — Univac, RCA, Honeywell, Burroughs, anybody but IBM — so in the 1970s I asked him if it was possible to buy some small obsolete machine just to play with at home. He said he didn’t think so, and besides, who’d want one at home?
So our first household computer didn’t arrive until late 1983, when Texas Instruments decided to get out of the home-computer business, and to speed the process, it put the TI-99/4A on sale for $49.95. It didn’t have a monitor, but you could use an old TV set for that, and it had no disk drive, although it would store data with a cassette recorder.
THE KIDS AND I argued a lot about whose turn it was to use the computer, but the TI wasn’t useful for much except games and learning to use its BASIC language interpreter. Whenever I got something to work, I felt like shouting “Look, I wrote a program!”
A few months later, in the spring of 1984, I got a real computer — an Osborne I, with a modem and a daisy-wheel printer. I figured I’d give myself a week to learn WordStar and start producing useful work with it, and if I couldn’t, I’d go back to the big old IBM Executive with its finicky carbon-film ribbon.
I managed. The major problem was getting that printer to work with WordStar. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a printer from a menu; I had to go in with a debugger and place certain bytes at certain places in the WordStar program. Learning about those bytes meant recalling eighth-grade algebra where we learned about different number systems, based on 2 (binary) or 8 (octal) or 16 (hexadecimal) instead of the familiar 10. The “New Math” had its conservative critics even back then, but I was sure glad I’d had it.
Even then, the Osborne was obsolete. It had an 8-bit processor, the Zilog Z80, and used the CP/M operating system. The world was moving to the 16-bit processors, the Intel 8086 and 8088, and MS-DOS for an operating system. But I quickly learned a couple of things. One was that the modem made all computers equal — when I started sending columns to the Denver Post over the telephone line, its computers didn’t care what I was using. Another was that all computers quickly become obsolete, if indeed they weren’t already obsolete the moment they hit the shelves.
Mostly I learned that I needed to know more, and so when I saw a notice in the local newspaper that there would be a meeting about forming a computer users’ group in Salida, I went. I saw a few people there that I kind of knew, and a lot of people I didn’t. But they were all friendly and helpful, and when it was decided, at that first meeting, that the new Chaffee County Computer Club should have a newsletter, I felt so friendly and helpful that I volunteered to edit and produce it.
I had only one condition, which I thought would get me out of it. Most of the people at the meeting were respectable types, lawyers and bankers and the like, and so I figured that my condition would inspire them to find another editor. I said I’d be glad to put out the newsletter, if it could be called “SCUM,” which allegedly stood for Salida Computer Users’ Monthly.
To my surprise they agreed. SCUM and the computer club lasted about 10 years, and in some ways, SCUM is the ancestor of Colorado Central. Initially, I produced SCUM with WordStar on my Osborne — it may have been the world’s only newsletter for IBM PC users that was not made with an IBM PC or anything remotely compatible — I did get to compatibility in 1986 when I got a PC clone.
However, the club received review copies of all manner of software, because we were registered with IBM as an official users’ group, and those software companies just assumed that the CCCC was something bigger than about two dozen people far from any city.
THAT SOFTWARE INCLUDED Ventura Publisher, the first “desktop publishing” program for PCs. (We still use its descendant, Corel Ventura Publisher.) Mark Emmer had already figured out how to use it, and so when the free review copy arrived, there was somebody I could turn to for answers as I tried to lay out SCUM on a computer. Armed with that knowledge, and with the software, Martha and I were in a position to start making Colorado Central 11 years ago.
From the start, I wanted to make all of this magazine on the computer, but we didn’t know how at first, especially when it came to pictures. Printing presses are binary devices — they either put a spot of ink in a given place, or they don’t. With black ink, you get black or white, no shades of gray. Pictures (known as “half-tones” in the trade) fool your eyes into seeing gray — they’re really a bunch of black dots of varying sizes.
Converting a “continuous tone” photo into a “half-tone” image in a publication meant having the printer do it with a screen on a process camera, then pasting the resulting image onto the page that we had produced with the computer. We did acquire a scanner that first summer, and muddled our way along until we thought we knew what we were doing, so that exactly 10 years ago, the February 1995 edition, we produced the entire edition, including pictures, on the computer.
THEN WE’D TAKE those laser-printed pages (“flats” in the trade) to the printer, where they would be assembled for the press (eight to a plate, a process called “imposing”). A big camera (“process camera”) took a picture of them — a “page negative” — which was placed atop a photosensitive sheet of aluminum so that an arc-lamp could expose the “press plate,” which went on to print the magazine.
We couldn’t do it that way today if we wanted to. Back then, the computer had merely substituted for typesetting machines in the process. You made pages that the printer took a picture of. But the process camera is now as obsolete as the Osborne I.
Now we take a CD to the printer. We make up the pages on the computer screen, “export” them in Encapsulated PostScript (a “page description language”) and convert those files into PDF – Adobe Portable Document Format. The printer’s computer reads those, separates the colors, and directly burns the plates with a laser – hence there’s no intervening negative.
So in theory, there’s no paper involved until the printing press starts up. On this end, most of our submissions arrive via e-mail. Of course, the “paperless office” is just a fantasy, for we go through reams of the stuff. Part of it’s age, I suppose, since Martha and I learned our trades with paper, and we’re more comfortable reading it, and marking it as necessary, than we are staring at screens for hours.
Indeed, these computers save a lot of labor, although some days they don’t seem to save enough. Those electronic submissions come from all manner of computers and in a variety of data formats, ranging from plain text to Microsoft Word documents, and we have to convert them all into something we can work with — and that can be tedious and time-consuming.
Getting the stuff from computer to computer has been a challenge. When we started, we used the “sneakernet” – toting disks from one computer to another. After a year or two of that, I recalled a presentation at a computer club meeting about “the $25 network,” which linked computers with serial cables. I bought the software and linked two computers easily.
The third, however, was on a different electrical circuit, which caused sparks, smoke, and about $1,800 in fried parts when I tried to connect it. That made me so shy of networking that I didn’t try it again for several years.
Eventually, I screwed up my courage and got an Ethernet network to function that connects four computers with three different operating systems (Windows XP, Windows 98, and SuSE Linux 9.1) to a variety of printers, backup storage, and a router so they can share the broad-band Internet connection — and hey, a year ago, I didn’t even know what a router was, let alone how to manage one.
WHEN ALL THIS STUFF WORKS, I feel pretty good, although I keep thinking there’s a way to make it work better. And when it doesn’t, I might be crawling around looking for cables in dark corners, thinking “I was a journalism major. How did it come to this?”
And maybe that question has broader implications if it is rephrased. In my case, I find myself focusing on the machinery, rather than the purpose of the machinery — making a magazine that is attractive and good to read.
In a broader arena, I notice that much of the political decision-making system is focused on process — did we hold enough hearings, did we give proper notice, did every stakeholder have an opportunity to comment — rather than on result, like a good forest-management plan or trails system or river park or whatever it was they were talking about in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong. Process is important, just as tools are important. But they’re means to an end, not an end in themselves, and I suspect I’m not the only one who has a tendency to forget that from time to time. And by the way, during my breaks from writing this, I did get that Ethernet print server to work.
