Saturday, March 14, 2009

Word Processor

I've been doing some work at church which involves extracting old word-processing files from a word-processor. It's not a computer. It's from the days prior to PCs being a normal and customary possession of pastors. The secretary at church joked the other day about the terrible clacking noises I was making, and her eyes popped a bit when she saw the old-fashioned screen, black background, green computer letters. And this things is HUGE.

But the thing I'm so proud of is that I figured out how to turn it on, how to insert the floppies, how to maneuver around the text directory, and how to print. Woo hoo! Success! And these old machines are not quite so intuitive to use as the computers we have today.

It takes almost two minutes to print one page of text, and each sheet of paper needs to be hand-inserted like in a typewriter. That makes even my old [pokey] printer seem instantaneous. Theoretically, I think this gives me some time to read whenever I need to print out an old sermon or lecture.

My biggest problem so far is when I find myself groping around for the [non-existent] mouse, wanting to highlight something, or change windows. Nope. Not gonna happen. It's amazing to see what's happened to computers in the last two decades.

2 comments:

  1. Once last yr while I was reading a women's magazine at my mom's house, I caught my hand in mid-motion - it had been reaching for the mouse to bookmark the page. Of the magazine.

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