When traveling to Sierra Leone, I imagine the activities I saw such as growing food, constructing mud brick houses and tending donkey carts (without the donkeys because of the Tsetse fly) were pretty much the same as a hundred years ago. While likely fewer opportunities exist for Sierra Leoneans to adopt rapid technological change, the same has not been true in the West, especially for those embracing (or infatuated by) technology.
Training to be a software engineer in the late 1970's at The Evergreen State College, I recall designing and initial coding using yellow pads of paper and pencil. I would then transcribe to the TTY300 or, if I were luck, the Tektronix or ADM video terminal equivalent front ends for our wonderful HP 2000C time-sharing computer. The process worked out fine; I could code and debug outside in view of the clock tower. A louche hippy. The needed productivity was low enough: "four lines of debugged code per day," that the paper tech was not the chokepoint. Besides, I was helping to write Civilization, which as the time in the early to mid seventies was the largest multiplayer role-playing computer game in existence. Productivity was not a problem; I would just work eighteen hours a day on it.
Then I worked for Apple. Productivity by my peers became more on the order of 50-60 debugged lines of code per day or higher. Because each engineer could now have their own Apple ][, there was no longer a need to use paper. As long as one could get over the transition from paper design to video design and coding, productivity took a sharp turn upward. We still had to hand carry our five-inch floppies for golden mastering by the nascent code-control library person while the AppleTalk network and server design was worked out at Bandley III and the rest of the Cupertino campus.
Now productivity for software coders is measured on the order of 200-300 debugged lines of code per day. However the entire stream is now and has been for many years, paperless. From initial notes, to design review slides, to management and coding, building and package art, through final production and customer fulfillment and backup, the entire process is electronic. Even my friend in pubs had to be happy with the end result an Acrobat file or a web page or two rather than a manual.
Creative writing has lagged. Even now I use a yellow legal pad to jot out initial ideas, timelines and plot outlines. It sits by one of my monitors as I type the elaboration of its storyline into a suitable back-lit keyboard on my desk. Playing with my fetish Pelikan fountain pen or Uniball vision elite was as important as a Gauloise was to Sartre arguing over the evocation of Nausea. I guess the cultural inertia of the belletrist is pretty high.
But having changed my reading from mostly paper to mostly e-reader years ago (from the early days of the greenish screen Palm Pilot) I am making the transition to the total electronic work-flow: new Apple iPad, Notability app, desktop or laptop, Kindle store, electronic downloads and payment, to ACH deposit of royalties and finally buying groceries with a debit card. I don't know how it will work out, but if history is the judge, probably pretty well, after the initial dislocation.
I am guessing the rule-of-thumb of a thousand words a day will fall to the new rule of three thousand words a day for us transducing axon depolarization to glyphs.
I wonder what will be next to improve creative productivity?
What I want is a direct author to reader link, as well as a continuous flow as the successive refinement of work in the process of creation--all the while actually making a living at it, if the quality of the craft and the ongoing contentment of the reader warrants it.
But before you ask, I am still keeping the Pelikan safe in its worn leather case as it always will be one of my life's friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment