I had to explain the word “roneoed” to someone the other day. As in, “our school worksheets used to be roneoed..” Remember that purple methylated spirit smell?

I was fascinated by this World Wide Web thing (using Netscape 2 I think) and taught myself HTML and managed to convince my department heads that it was a good idea for us to have a website. I can still see it now (cringe).

I did the USENET groups thing and even did a mini research paper on it at uni (I also started studying in 1995 at 29 years old). I guess it was the beginning of social networking?

I did all of my essays on the computer and mostly edited them on the computer too. I can’t visualise doing it any other way because I find the editing on the screen so much easier.

If it wasn’t for the WWW goodness knows what I’d be doing now as my job title has the word ‘web’ in it.

I sometimes ask myself what our lives would be like without the microchip. Society would simply cease to function.

OTOH, society would never have got like this in the first place — I found that the expectation of speeded-up function was one of the very first effects of general computer use: that the more you could do, the more you were expected to do.

The very first thing I noticed after my academic department was completely computerised c. 1990 was that the amount of work we were all expected to do had roughly tripled overnight. Suddenly we were expected do, with no training, everything the secretaries had previously been employed to do: typing, copying, filing, establishing systems and maintaining student records, AS WELL AS all the teaching, preparation, marking and research we had been originally employed to do.

It is a strange feeling to realise that my early adult years are now history, in a social space which can never be retrieved. “The past is another country. They do things differently there.�

David, I think our generation is quite unusual in expecting this not to be the case!

(Cue chorus of Boomer-hatin’.)

The conditions for most prizes & scholarships were set decades ago, and students over 35 or 40 are ineligible for a great many of them.

I was forced to use my first tripewriter because my lecturers told me they simply would not mark anything from me again in longhand. That imposed an interesting transitional discipline. I would hammer the thing out on my tripewriter, then cut and paste bits together (the bionic word processor, as a later joke says) and then belt them keys until I copied it out again.

When I set up my tenuous relationship with the world of work, I basically spent about eighty percent of my time copytyping. By now on vast, noisy cheap non-IBM electric typewriters. Three great things follow from this procedure - 1) I had to re-look at every single word; 2) each version changed and improved and 3) each para related to the para before and after. Narrative development, if not an actual argument.

It also encouraged a mantra which has been very useful all my life. Don’t rewrite - do it right the first time. When I first worked to deadlines on magazine copy, I learnt to do version after version of the first para, and then move on when it threw me naturally to the next one. I still do a variant of this, which I describe as “Make sure you start in the right place. If it doesn’t work, you need to start somewhere else.”

Then I discovered WordStar. “Dot command” is the phrase of the eighties, as far as I am concerned. Now we have the wonders of GUI, WYSIWYG and Photoshop. I love the computer, adore the internetweb, feel hugely empowered as a writer by being able to publish for myself.

These days, I also edit prose by other people. I still get a pang as I realise that the flow is a bit jumbled, and that some bits are more finished than others. In drama, for instance, it is easy for a scene which feels good to sail through the process for draft after draft, never changed as the film adapts around it.

Indeed, this provides one sign of good screenwriters. Suggest a change in one scene, and they sigh and say, “This will change everything”, and go off to do it. Directors who are just pretending won’t bother with the work.

I first encountered a fax machine in the late seventies when I did a bit of film research at Xerox in London. They told me they had a new machine that worked like a photocopier but printed out at a remote location. I thought, “Why would you do that? You are standing beside the copier.” Some days later the penny dropped and I realised the whole messenger industry was stuffed.

Then again, in those days, the photocopier was on a different floor, and you delivered the typed text with a request chit to a special room which was full of noise and flashing lights and strange people in white coats. They guaranteed service within half a working day. And again, the one manager who typed her (of course) own correspondence was considered to betray the side and “wasn’t really manager material”.

Everyone believed that the standard of office correspodence would collapse when they took away the typing pool.

How many larvyprods can remember running to the bank before 3.30 to get some money? And discovering they had forgotten their savings books?

I sometimes ask myself what our lives would be like without the microchip. Society would simply cease to function. All this has happened in less than 30 years, and really in the last twenty. Then again, we went from the first aeroplane to the atom bomb in forty years, which was also the duration from the biplane to the moon landing.

It is a strange feeling to realise that my early adult years are now history, in a social space which can never be retrieved. “The past is another country. They do things differently there.”

first explored the net at a Monash Uni (Gippsland) open day. The URL bar and bookmarks already had playboy.com etc marked…

The family then went for the ol’ 20hr per month dial up via Netspace. Would have been around 1995 or 96.

I remember using excite, yahoo and chat sites: javachat, yahoo chat etc. also got onto ICQ pretty early… Given i was in highschool and into nintendo - a lot of my time on the net was spent reading N64hq.com and other gaming sites. I enjoyed the sense of community from these little sites and seeing my name ‘in print’ on the letters section was a real buzz.

I’ve essentially grown up with writing essays in word as my high school made notebook computers compulsory when I was in year 9. I remember the principal telling the school and after which a friend turned to me and said “What’s a notebook computer?”

typing class was then also ‘compulsory’ for 10 mins every morning. while the merits of having notebooks at high school can be debated (i didn’t use it in year 12 at all) - i’m thankful for the typing practice!

these days at uni for Arts subjects I’ll handwrite notes from books (love going to the library - you can’t read philosophy texts online!) and then draft and final copy on computer. And I enjoy writing 2000 words of philosophy in a 2 hr exam.

physics and maths work is generally all hand written and I still haven’t learnt LaTeX yet… (nor would use it for solving eqns/algebra). Although C didn’t come in handy last year. C is simple yet powerful for numerical calculations where you don’t need pretty pictures.

I find that “chalk and talk” is just as effective as Overheads or powerpoint. as long as its used well and allows the students to learn and follow at a reasonable pace.

one lecturer justified his quantum mechanics chalk and talk by saying that Schrodinger, Born et al had taught/learnt that way - so why shouldn’t we? =)

oh and JG: i’m still shaking my head…

m

I first used a fax at this beginning of 2007 to send a copy of a signed form to OUP.

It felt so bizarre.

After that my abiding computer memory was of one of the early Macs. I was forced to take photographs of the screen because I was in the middle of a particularly important essay, and the damned machine had crashed yet again, rendering all functions other than scrolling as disabled. Never happened on the Amiga. And it had colour!