[ExI] effect/affect again.

[David C. Harris]

Max More wrote:
>
>> Actually I must be honest and disqualify myself from this one, for I 
>> am one who not only knows what is a typewriter, but actually used 
>> one, in college. I can out-geezer almost everyone here by having used 
>> the kind (in college!) which does not plug in to the wall.  Perhaps 
>> only Damien can match this, methinks.
>>
>> spike
>
> My *dear* fellow. I'll have you know that I wrote my undergraduate 
> thesis using a typewriter. (Something on eudaimonic egoism..., around 
> 1986.) I also created three issues of a quite fancy comics fanzine 
> called Starlight in 1979 and 1980 -- with hand-justified columns and 
> some experimental, slanted column layouts, entirely using a typewriter 
> and hand-spacing to achieve justified columns. (You might reply that 
> the effect was a mere affectation, but it was still an effort 
> incomparable to anything post-computer.)
>
> Max
Ahhhh, honored Max, geezerdom is not earned by stupendous effort and 
skill, which you exhibit, but by being OLD!  I think I bought my 
typewriter (elite size character set composed of UGLY san serif letters) 
around 1963,  used it for a few years, and submitted decks of "IBM 
cards" to a CDC 6600 time shared mainframe around 1965 at UC Berkeley.  
Now that equipment is making me smile during visits to the Computer 
History Museum in Mountain View, CA.  I claim less talent and more OLD! 
  ;-)  

If  regenerative medicine doesn't save me from permanent death, I hope 
someone will reanimate me from Alcor's tanks to be a tour guide at the 
Museum, where I can regale visitors with stories of using a 029 keypunch 
to make a deck of computer cards with holes punched to allow notching to 
allow some cards to drop off when a paper clip was inserted.   Sounded 
great, but I didn't have a logical system for more than a nonexclusive 
OR.  When I later encountered Boolean logic I was one motivated student!

Oh, and for Spike, a typewriter is a system that takes single character 
input from a keyboard and immediately outputs it to a printing device, 
one character at a time, unbuffered, right?

  - David Harris, Palo Alto, California.