WordStar Anyone?
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007While we’re all having a fit of nostalgia around here, I do have to admit to growing up as what you might call, less than a geek. (I was on the Math Team at one point though!) Actually, I didn’t really have a computer in the house until 1985 or so, an old IBM PC, you remember the kind with dual floppy drives, one to boot the DOS OS and the other for whatever programs you wanted to run? Yeah, no hard drive of any kind. 
I never had a Commodore 64, never really took to programming, (they tried to teach us BASIC back in those days in High School, and TurboPascal during my freshman year of college, that’s what they considered being computer literate.) but I do remember countless hours spent loading Frogger and Qbert from floppy disk.
Of course, we had a dual monitor setup, with a small, something like 9 inch, color CRT for the games. I can remember struggling with the correct DOS commands to load the game so that the output went to the correct screen, and no I don’t have the slightest idea what the command was, which shows my lack of geek cred I guess. That was nothing, of course, to the struggles trying to type up research papers my senior year, and on into my freshman year of college in WordStar. I can’t tell a lie, Wordstar wasn’t actually all that bad a program at all, I was usually able to type up the papers pretty easily, it was printing them that was a huge headache! Keeping the paper from falling off the spool of the dot-matrix printer and getting the page completely misaligned, random page breaks that would cause the printer to page forward in the middle of a page, which inevitably caused the printer to print over top of the perforation between pages, etc. It was like a scene from Office Space, that printer and I going at it, usually late at night when the paper was due in the morning. (Yup, I had killer study habits, and never procrastinated, back in the day….)
I seem to recall that after a few instances like this, I was destined to discover my first technology “workaround”. If I printed the paper one page at a time, instead of trying to print it all at once, I could usually avoid the headaches.
Who knew that 22 years later, I’d be making a living out of finding ways to work around technology? 
