Taking up the fight against obsolescence
By Bill Duncan
The trouble with modern technology is that whatever you buy is obsolete before you can take it out of the box and decide which language of the instructions will be less confusing.
My experience is that the easy instructions are not written in English. As a writer, I feel much more comfortable with my old Number 5 Underwood, but alas the world has spun beyond typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. You would think the iMac I bought in 2003 would be considered modern technology. It is for me, because I have yet to figure out everything that lights up on my screen. But, no, three years in computer technology is light years away from modernity.
I discovered this when the printer attached to the iMac these past three years went belly up the other day and I mistakenly thought a replacement would be just a matter of how much money I wanted to spend. Of course, I also thought it was just a matter of plugging it into the iMac and the nearest electrical outlet. Not so easy.
I discovered my iMac is considered obsolete and unless I upgrade the operating system there is no printer that can make the connection. I was willing to upgrade, but then I discovered I would lose the documents I had saved under the old system. Since I was nearing deadline on a magazine I produce monthly, this didn’t seem a good option – in fact it appeared to me to be downright madness. I was also informed that the new upgrade would create a whole new learning curve for this Underwood 5 man because everything in the upgrade is new and improved, including the terminology.
Little wonder I am lost in cyberspace. After a long search, I eventually found a printer that would take commands from an iMac with my old, obsolete operating system. It was the last one in the store and I was warned that it was considered obsolete, that’s why it was on sale. What worries me is that I have just purchased a whole bunch of obsolete equipment. In order to buy a simple printer that would work in obsolesce, it came attached to a machine that has all the bells and whistles – a fax machine, a scanner, a copy machine – as well as the printer.
I must confess that the use of computers to set type is a miracle of technology. I come from an era that almost dates back to Johannes Gutenberg. In fact I cut my newspaper teeth on lead slugs. This is hard for me to admit, but you might say I have evolved along with computers.
I was an editor in California when the daily newspaper I worked for first switched to offset printing from the old hot-type method. We pioneered setting type for newspapers on an IBM Selectric typewriter. That rudimentary method led to the sophisticated computer typesetting of today. Even so, that evolution has not been smooth for me.
Mentally reviewing the frustrations of learning to use the new innovations, mostly by trial and error, each time an upgrade came along, unintelligible manuals came with it. The manuals are incomprehensible to me even though I pride myself on being a comprehensive reader.
To some readers, production of a newspaper may seem to be simple in this electronic era, but I still consider it just this side of a miracle. Indeed it is a miracle to anyone who worked on newspapers during the hot type era.
For example today, this column is written on an iMac, an Apple computer. The words will be edited on a screen, transferred from the computer’s hard drive to be attached to an e-mail to end up as type in this newspaper – even though modern technology considers the machine I use is obsolete.
Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com.