My Life with the Machine

by Diane Fisher Miller

In the Beginning

It's 1962 and I'm a high-school sophomore. My mother makes me take typing. I hate it! Thirty manual typewriters sound like a fire in a popcorn factory. Bells sound continuously, carriages ratchet back to start new lines. My slender fingers jam painfully between the keys. Hard, gritty erasers furiously scratch mistakes off master and six carbons. But after two semesters of this aggravation, I can type 50 words per minute without looking.

An Electric Assist

It's now summer and I am thrilled to work in a medical lab as a technician's assistant. I analyze urine, cook up bacteriological media, stain slides, bathe pregnancy-test frogs. I learn, do, feel important. But (stupid girl!) I let it slip that I can type. Alas! I become trapped in the office. I will never so much as wash a test tube again...

At least the typewriter is an improvement: an electric IBM Executive, with proportional spacing. Imagine a machine smart enough to advance a greater distance along the line after typing an "M" than after typing a "j"! God help me, though, when I make a mistake and have to cram an "m" into a "j" space. But I get work done: lots of it.

Good Morning, HAL

It's 1971 and I work for a NASA contractor in the Apollo program at Kennedy Space Center. The electrical engineers revise their test procedures by marking up an 11x17-inch, fan-folded line-printer file dump. Then they give the printout to me.

The terminal that I use to enter their changes looks something like an IBM Selectric typewriter. But it doesn't sit upon a desk, it is the desk. It talks to a line-editing program on an IBM 370/168 mainframe computer in a building five miles away. I pull up a chair and start.

The lines of the printout are numbered. For each change, I enter a command that names the line number, then tells the program what to do with it. For example, "on line 13298 replace 'transducer CB5' with 'switch 14B'." Or, "delete lines 13291 through 13313" or "add '<<type in several new lines here>>' to follow line 1459."

The syntax is actually more cryptic and less forgiving. When I delete or add lines, the line numbering for everything following changes. I work from back to front; if I had started at the beginning by deleting or adding lines, I'd soon be in trouble. After I send each command, I must wait for the program to type back an acknowledgement. No display. No "Oops! Undo that!" button.

Developing My Character

It's 1975 and six months since I completed my previously postponed English degree. Not having received that Fortune 500 junior executive offer I was waiting for, I get real and take a job as a technical secretary in an environmental consulting company. I type proposals and reports on my old idiosyncratic friend, the IBM Executive. But how in the heck am I going to type all those Greek letters and funny math symbols?

I am presented with a briefcase-sized wooden box filled with rows and rows of "Typits". Each one of these 3-inch-long plastic sticks has a metal-type letter or symbol stuck to one end. I find the right character, jam the Typit onto a bracket on the typewriter, and then ram the Typit with any other key to make the Typit strike the paper. Voilà, I have a µ <<Greek mu>, <<Greek capital sigma>, <<integral sign>, or whatever. Now I am typing about one word every 50 minutes! Tedious, tedious.

The company soon orders a Xerox 800 Dual Tape System, the latest in electronic word processing. I go to Xerox 800 school for five days, then return to work late Friday afternoon. We have a proposal to put out over the weekend.

Stacked around my work space are the boxes containing the new machine. I could push them aside and create this hot-deadline proposal the old way. But, noooo. I tear open the boxes, set up the machine, and start showing off.

By Sunday afternoon, I urgently want to throw the Xerox 800 through the window, then run over it with the company van. It seems that the instructor forgot to tell me a few things about doing multi-page documents, and somehow the Xerox Corp. has not considered offering weekend customer support to their (now 12) customers. To do any serious editing, I must use both tape drives, and, without a display, I must visualize and mentally track what is going onto the tapes.

Oh, yes, the Greek and math characters now come on a customized daisy wheel. It costs $300! Alternatively, we leave blank spaces on the page and try to remember, on the final printout, to transfer the special characters from a sheet of rub-ons.

Let the Upgrades Begin

After I've used the machine for about a month and have produced a number of very attractive, letter-perfect, right-justified (the most popular feature) documents, one of the vice-presidents brings an important visitor into my area. Without introducing me, he brags to the visitor about our new word processing machine and what beautiful documents it turns out. He is, apparently, unaware of the human effort and frustration involved in wringing these masterpieces out of this dumb machine.

I realize that I am the only person in the company who can operate this machine. But I don't feel important and needed; I feel like a slave and a prisoner. Management soon concludes that it isn't good for one machine to hold the whole company hostage. The company is growing, so I am given an assistant and a second machine. Then a third and a fourth machine.

I find myself in charge of three technical secretaries and a technical illustrator, who works with pens and ink at a drafting table. We turn out volumes of work. The scientists and engineers write on yellow pads, and we decipher their scribbles and correct their grammar and spelling as we type. Drawings and half-toned photographs are rubber-cemented or hot-waxed into the final printouts by hand. We do damned good work.

In a couple of years, our 800s are upgraded to 850s, with 25-character glowing amber displays and drives for 8" random-access floppy disks instead of tapes. After a couple more years, we get a Xerox word processor with a full-page display and a separate printer that feeds loose sheets. What a concept! Except that it keeps jamming.

The Tool Becomes the Subject

It's 1983 and my company falters. Many people, including me, are laid off. I'd happily left supervising behind some time ago, moving into a technical writing and editing position. For two or three years, I've lived by pen and pencils alone. Can I land another job like that?

Since I'm not exactly a rocket scientist, I soon find that if I want to actually write documents (instead of just edit them), the subject will have to be software applications and how to use them. In the position that I take, I use a CPM-type computer with WordStar, then a PC/XT with WordPerfect. Graphics are either hand-drawn by our graphics department and pasted in, or I draw them in WordPerfect with ASCII characters.

Soon almost everyone gets a PC. IBM-compatibles or Macintoshes replace the secretaries' typewriters. Engineers, scientists, managers, buyers, accountants — everyone except the janitor has his or her own PC. Engineers and managers now type their own memos and reports. They fiddle with formatting. They worry over margins and fonts (especially fonts!). They use PageMaker or Ventura Publisher to publish a 10-page report. An ugly 10-page report.

One's No Longer Enough

Now it's 1989 and, using both an IBM clone and a Macintosh, I write manuals about UNIX-based applications. I use the Mac because it's better for graphics, the PC because I'm used to it for writing. Also, I just need the flexibility so that I can deal with other people's files, because my employer will not mandate a standard.

Software gets easier to use (although more things go wrong with it). Despite the complexity, I am still productive. I am not too proud to paste a MacDraw graphic into a WordPerfect 4.2 document, rather than spend a half-day trying to merge the two electronically. I am already labelled a Luddite by some. Harrumph. Paper is still our most important product.

In the year of Windows 95, I still write user guides, but now I also develop on-line documents for the World Wide Web. My PC is now a Pentium 90, 32 MB of memory, 2 gigabytes of storage, CD ROM, and fast network connections to the world. I have upgraded my Macintosh to a PowerPC, also networked. And I have an HP LaserJet 4M+ printer and a network connection to a colour laser printer. In other words, I have about $14,000 worth of computer equipment in my office. And so does almost everyone else.

The Machine Rears Up . . .

I strive to be a computer expert just so I can write and maintain documents. And the documents are not even about the computer on which I must be an expert! I learn to troubleshoot and solve unique problems with machines that have become so complex that neither I nor anybody else can really understand them. And still, people use them for the most basic of tasks.

Something is always new. Something is always breaking. Something works one time and not the next. Some gratuitous graphic must be created and inserted. We must put everything on line, upload and download files, help people to access them. We must continuously upgrade our software, learn new applications, sift through volumes of information on "new and improved" tools. We buy new hardware components every two years to support all the new, irresistibly compelling software.

Who's serving whom here? Rainer Maria Rilke, in The Sonnets to Orpheus, wrote:

      Master, do you hear the New
            quiver and rumble?
            Harbingers step forth who
            blare their approval.

            Surely no ear is whole
            amid this noise,
            yet the machine-part still
            asks for our praise.

            Look, the machine:
            rears up and takes revenge,
            brings us to crawl and cringe.

            Since all its strength is from us,
            let it, desireless,
            serve and remain.

I think I've been had.

Diane Fisher Miller works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in the Mission Operations Section. She now spends most of her time developing web sites, both for internal information distribution and for public outreach. She is currently being dragged — crawling and cringing — into the world of Java, JavaScript, and other obscure realms.

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