1978 - Word Processing on a Mainframe
When I began an MA program in English at Penn State University in 1978 at the age of 26, then Associate Professor of English John B. Smith, who would later become one of the authors of Storyspace and move on to a career in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, offered a non-credit, term-long workshop on using the University's mainframe computer for various literary tasks, including writing, text analysis, and compiling bibliographies. The writing program was called SCRIPT (see the "History" section), the text analysis program RATS (for "Random Accessible Text System"), and the bibliographic program, if memory serves me right, was called BAG II (between 1979 and 1982, Professor Smith coauthored the annual update of the Annotated World Bibliography for Shakespeare—now the World Shakespeare Bibliography—with Professor Harrison T. Meserole, who at the time was also on the faculty at Penn State).
At first, the workshop group included about a dozen graduate students and a dozen faculty members (or, if I am wrong about the total, equal numbers of grad students and faculty). Before too many weeks had passed, the group had shrunk to a handful of graduate students, but I was fascinated and hooked. Why? Who knows? I was, at the time, an Extra Class Amateur Radio Operator, so I was fairly comfortable around electronic technology, and a good part of my involvement with computers over the past 28 years probably stems from a fasination with making things work. However, I now tell myself that the real draw was the potential to "download" some of the tedium of writing—especially retyping of essays—to the computer and focus more time on creating and expressing literary arguments.
Of course, what I viewed as the wonders of text processing in 1978 would seem like tedium today. We worked at dumb terminals across campus linked to an IBM 370 mainframe housed in the University Computing Center. In 1978, editing SCRIPT over those terminals involved line editing: you called up a single line of your text file (a line which had no relationship to the line breaks in your printout—this was way before WYSIWYG), corrected it, and then submitted those corrections to the mainframe. To insert lengthy text, you had to insert extra line numbers between existing lines. All formatting, including line and paragraph breaks, had to be included in the text as formatting commands (much like writing HTML code). And to print a draft of your essay, you had to submit a print job to a line printer at the University Computing Center and pick up your job from a bin at the Center. Believe it or not, all that still seemed easier than retyping a 20-page seminar paper to incorporate changes.
Over the next few years, we jumped for joy when the technology allowed for screen editing (editing an entire screen of lines in your terminal's memory before having to save to the mainframe) and accessing the mainframe from home via cheap dumb terminals with, if I remember correctly, 100-baud dial-up modems (my first one came from Zenith).
After that workshop, I wrote everything in Waterloo SCRIPT and printed my seminar papers and my masters thesis on a line printer—often to the consternation of my professors :-). I didn't do much with RATS and BAG II at the time, but Professor Smith had made the point that the computer was not only an instrument for writing (or any other task) but also a tool for creating new tools. Consequently, during a stint as a graduate administrative assistant with the First-Year Writing Program at Penn State, I learned to program in REXX, a scripting language that allowed us to automate a number of clerical tasks involved in running a statewide writing contest for highschool students.
That early workshop not only introduced me to academic computing but also established several emphases for my engagement with it over the next three decades: seeing computers as tools for manipulating and analyzing texts; creating tools over the years in BASIC, HyperTalk, AppleScript, and XML for streamlining tasks; and asking questions about how digital technology affected, and was affected by, the most fundamental questions in my discipline.
At first, the workshop group included about a dozen graduate students and a dozen faculty members (or, if I am wrong about the total, equal numbers of grad students and faculty). Before too many weeks had passed, the group had shrunk to a handful of graduate students, but I was fascinated and hooked. Why? Who knows? I was, at the time, an Extra Class Amateur Radio Operator, so I was fairly comfortable around electronic technology, and a good part of my involvement with computers over the past 28 years probably stems from a fasination with making things work. However, I now tell myself that the real draw was the potential to "download" some of the tedium of writing—especially retyping of essays—to the computer and focus more time on creating and expressing literary arguments.
Of course, what I viewed as the wonders of text processing in 1978 would seem like tedium today. We worked at dumb terminals across campus linked to an IBM 370 mainframe housed in the University Computing Center. In 1978, editing SCRIPT over those terminals involved line editing: you called up a single line of your text file (a line which had no relationship to the line breaks in your printout—this was way before WYSIWYG), corrected it, and then submitted those corrections to the mainframe. To insert lengthy text, you had to insert extra line numbers between existing lines. All formatting, including line and paragraph breaks, had to be included in the text as formatting commands (much like writing HTML code). And to print a draft of your essay, you had to submit a print job to a line printer at the University Computing Center and pick up your job from a bin at the Center. Believe it or not, all that still seemed easier than retyping a 20-page seminar paper to incorporate changes.
Over the next few years, we jumped for joy when the technology allowed for screen editing (editing an entire screen of lines in your terminal's memory before having to save to the mainframe) and accessing the mainframe from home via cheap dumb terminals with, if I remember correctly, 100-baud dial-up modems (my first one came from Zenith).
After that workshop, I wrote everything in Waterloo SCRIPT and printed my seminar papers and my masters thesis on a line printer—often to the consternation of my professors :-). I didn't do much with RATS and BAG II at the time, but Professor Smith had made the point that the computer was not only an instrument for writing (or any other task) but also a tool for creating new tools. Consequently, during a stint as a graduate administrative assistant with the First-Year Writing Program at Penn State, I learned to program in REXX, a scripting language that allowed us to automate a number of clerical tasks involved in running a statewide writing contest for highschool students.
That early workshop not only introduced me to academic computing but also established several emphases for my engagement with it over the next three decades: seeing computers as tools for manipulating and analyzing texts; creating tools over the years in BASIC, HyperTalk, AppleScript, and XML for streamlining tasks; and asking questions about how digital technology affected, and was affected by, the most fundamental questions in my discipline.
Lewis
posted by Lewis | 9:56 AM
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