Discussion on:

Blame it on the word processor

My apologies for the bold font, I?m having issues with the posting software and even more problems trying to go back and re-edit.

On the other hand, anyone my age may be happy to have the improved contrast.

I learned to type on an old Royal manual typewriter. There's nothing worse than getting to the bottom of the page and realizing that you left a word out in the 3rd line. It was a beautiful day when I got to use an IBM Selectric. What's this you say? There's BUILT IN correction tape!?! I also sympathize with Asimov. I have flown in my last plane. The panic attacks aren't worth it, and when I can drive 8 hours and get home before the 1 hour flight does, it's time to stop. (No joke, that 1 hour flight leaving Chicago took 9 hours from the time I arrived at the airport to the time I made it to my airport and picked up my baggage. It's a 7 1/2 hour drive.

I preferred driving over flying, just because of the additional experience of the trip that you don't get from flying, ever since my first road trip when I was in high school. I'd still fly from time to time, though, when it was more convenient to do so than to drive -- such as when I flew from Florida to California, then rented a van and loaded it up with a bunch of stuff I had in storage there to drive it back to Florida.

As the TSA, and post-9/11 conditions in general, make it more and more of a hassle to fly, however, I become ever-more reluctant to use commercial airlines. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I never fly a commercial airline again, unless either my point of departure or point of arrival is in another country. Transportation between US cities is just a heck of a lot easier when you do it on the ground rather than dealing with the TSA and other hassles of flying these days.

And of course so much of it is just make work to spend tax payer money and make it look a if someone was being serious about security threats rather than simply protecting against the last incident.

I recently took my cousin to a regional airport to connect for a flight across country and, even though I expected it and tried to prepare him, I just couldn?t make him understand why he was being treated as a criminal, subject to search before getting on a plane.

He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and has 5 bronze stars ? you can?t tell me that a sensible security system would search his shoes and medicine because he might be an Islamic terrorist.

I wouldn't object if I thought the security measures made the slightest sense.

So much of it is just political correctness which doesn?t let anyone point out that some people are simply much more likely to carry a bomb than others, leaving no money, time, or personel to search the checked luggage.

The great age of travel is rapidly ending.

The freedom to travel unmolested is the freedom to flee when freedom otherwise becomes too scarce. This is all just another sign of how things are going downhill in the good ol' US of A, with regards to protecting the rights and liberties of individual human beings.

Liked your article. I'm a hardware guy who is still involved with the hardware. From IBM Unit Record, 1401, 360 and 370 days. Word Processing existed as the "Text Editor" built in to the "CP5" Operating System of the Sigma Series Mainframe Computers originaly created by Scientific Data Systems back in the late 1950's and then purchased by Xerox. Then Wang Laboratories made and sold standalone word processing systems to a gazillion of customers. Prior to Lotus there was a spreadsheet program called "CALC" which then grew to be "SUPERCALC". Probably the best of the original word processing packages for small computers came from PFS who wrote a suite for the original Apple Computers and then made them available to PC's. PFS Write was the word processor, they had a spreadsheet package, a report generator, a database, etc. IBM bought the rights to the package and called them IBM Writing Assistant, etc. Of course the best of the best wordprocessor was AMIPRO by Lotus, until Bill and Company made a copy of it called WORD.

I wrote my first programs in 1968, are you from the 50s or what?

I started full time in computing in 1965 on a Feranti Sirius computer - a decimal machine with nickel delay lines. Paper tape input and output (oh, those tangles!) Had it's own Autocode programming language.