output and my biocomputer yielded to me the way I
could get a Rolls Royce. Eurekas! I love I em!
I guess you could say I'm from the old school. I was
fourteen when I left school and there certainly weren't
any computers around. The greatest thing was a
transistor radio and we used to marvel at them
crackling away, kidding ourselves how good they were.
Now although I've been a writer for a good
number of years that doesn't mean to say I can use a
word processor. The first book I ever wrote was in long
hand and I got my favorite secretary to type it up for
me. After that I progressed from manual typewriters to
various electric models. I have to confess I liked the
old IBM Selectrics. I tried later models with daisy
wheels and memories but they never seemed to work
too good for me. I always went back to the heavy old
IBM's. I was building up quite a negative program
towards modern word processors.
Quite recently one of my partners sat me down in
a chair in front of a desk top computer and thrust a
mouse' in my hand and tried to get me to move the
cursor around on the screen and try to get the feel of it.
I really couldn't understand what I was meant to be
accomplishing. I knew this wasn't for me and after a
few mo ments I got up and walked off.
Over the next few months I bumped into a number
of colleagues and on each occasion the conversation got
round to word processing. Each of them told me how
simple it was and how I could type up my manuscripts
and edit them all so simply. For some unknown reason I
started to visualize myself at a word processor (that's
exactly how I taught myself how to type) typing up a
manuscript. Very shortly that input became output and
I found myself merrily working away on a word
processor. I had about seven minutes of lessons, and
away I went. I called my colleague from time to time to