Early 1980s - Word Processing on an Epson

Few people of my generation had computers when I bought my first one, an Epson which ran on an operating system that was soon abandoned for DOS. It had no hard drive—few personal computers did in the early 1980s. Instead, users inserted one 5¼" black floppy disk in one drive in order to boot up the word processing program and another floppy disk in the other drive to receive—and save—documents. I had chosen the Epson over IBM because it had a WYSIWYG word processing program that allowed users to name files with phrases instead of code words. It didn’t hurt that it was cheaper and prettier, too.

I bought my computer specifically because I needed a tool that would make writing easier. Having started my graduate school career at the advanced age of thirty-eight, I needed all the help I could get. The old pencil-to-typewriter system had barely sustained me through graduate courses, and none of the three-to-ten page papers I had produced over the first three years of study would have won any prizes for neatness of presentation. Composing my dissertation had become a nightmare of handwritten notes and badly typed sheets of cheap paper covered with arrows, connecting lines, and asterisks numbered so that I could figure out what went where. It was an “insert asterisk B here” system which didn’t allow for sudden insights into the text that always occurred when I was trying to type out the final copy.
Oddly enough, my English department colleagues played no part in convincing me to make the purchase. My ex-husband, a scientist who had used the kind of computers that filled large rooms, and my cousin, who was eventually to become a millionaire based on his computer savvy, first urged me to try word-processing. Like others in the English, I wasn’t sure that the computer would be any improvement over the typewriter. However, shortly after a disaster of an editing session occurred that left my entire living room floor covered with an odd bits of text taped together in a gigantic puzzle. As I attempted to type up those pieces in the order in which I’d laid them out and NOT revise at the same time, I became obsessed with the idea of a technology which would keep me off my knees and the floor clear. Crazed by hope of order, I took out a student loan and turn over most of it over to the Epson people. It couldn’t get much worst, I figured—anything that might help get more words on paper had to be an improvement.

And, much to my joy, the “little Epson that could” did help get words on paper. It helped me insert one block of words into another. It allowed me to remove words but not lose them, and it even provided a way to mark a place where I needed more information and ask questions of myself to be considered later. I reveled in on-screen composing, creating documents of ten to thirty pages. I free-wrote; I revised; I printed out hard text that I could edit and then throw away! Producing text ceased to be a problem. Revising became a intellectual pursuit rather than a simple matter of correctly reproducing a scribbled document.

The process was not without grief. Before I learned the importance of saving documents frequently, I lost some important ideas and had to recreate them. Once in a flurry of excitement and adrenaline, I produced thirty pages in a binge writing session that lasted all day. As hard as it is for me to understand today, I never saved during that long productive day. Saving was something I habitually did at the end of a writing session. When I finally gave in to mental and physical exhaustion, I simply turned off the computer. In a split second, I knew I’d lost it all. My grief was only exceeded by my disgust with my failure to follow a simply technological process.

But I learned from that experience—I have probably saved this document too compulsively—and as I produced my dissertation, I discovered a tool that drove me to advocate for computers for students as well as for the lonely academic writer in the garret. Computer composing remains at the center of my pedagogy, and I’ve urged more than one student to at least try using the computer as more than a typewriter with spell-check. Nowadays it’s uncommon to find students who don’t have computers in college. That’s not to say that I believe the nation has succeeded in providing universal access to technology. Many families still can’t afford computers much less internet connections. Like me, today’s college-aged adults still take out student loans in order to buy a laptop or desk model computer, and just as often as not, their purchases, like mine, are prompted by their need to write papers, to compose and revise, to write.

Marcia