My laptop went into hospice care last week. It's an essential tool for my writing career, and I was terrified that it would die at the most inconvenient moment. So I replaced it.
I exaggerate, of course. A computer isn’t an essential tool.
Shakespeare wrote with pen and ink and Hemingway used an old-fashioned
typewriter, yet they both managed to produce master works that are still
selling today. And when I’m away from my computer, I use pen and ink, too. So a
working laptop isn’t a necessity.
But it is a huge convenience.
Typewriters were the technological preference of most
individuals when I was in college. They were imperfect time-savers. To make
corrections, I used an eraser, whiteout, or correction tape. Not very professional
looking. So I had two alternatives: (1) hire someone else to type my papers or
(2) type each page until it came out error-free. I was too cheap (or too poor)
to do the first, so I chose the time-consuming second option.
Then there was that back-up copy. Before the invention of
carbon paper, it was done manually. I used carbon paper, but that had its
problems, too. Correcting the copy was a messy job that often left an
unreadable blob where the error had been. Thank goodness for the invention of
the photocopy machine.
I’m sure it was even worse in Shakespeare’s time. Imagine
re-copying everything in long hand.
Now the computer saves our changes and spits out back-up copies in seconds. Sometimes it even makes changes automatically—whether
we want them or not. (I’m a big fan of turning off most of the auto-correct
options.)
In my 30 or 40 years of computer ownership, I’ve progressed
from DOS to various versions of Windows, including Vista, XP, and, most
recently, Windows 7. Now I have to get used to Windows 8.
New technologies can be daunting, and we have to be careful
not to rely on them. But I can’t imagine going back to my typewriter days.
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