Editorial

Posted 04/29/2004 by Charles East

Mr. Jenne's recall brings back fond memories of time aboard the ship... yes that "Zenith Z-80 PC" was my undoing... I thought for sure I would become a staunch Macophyte, but it was not to be... I was forever cursed to gaze upon screens of green and dream of animated smiling computer faces welcoming me to the cyberland of peaceful computing. I recall many hours of running that cute little MAC belonging to FOX DIVO, playing games, publishing the next edition of the POD with the Cruise MAP at the top. I well remember you coming to me and asking me to provide assistance in setting up the ship's first computer. MS DOS 1.x and Word Star 1.0 was anything but nice... But we kicked it around and if I recall, after about a month we had it fairly well beaten into submission. I think I can still hear the occasional swearing in the ship's office as I passed by, smiling to myself about how I would never have to deal with that again as I was short... Boy was I wrong! That was 1985... In 1989 I returned to the Navy to SIMA LC and worked in the RO's office.. with yet another cursed green screen... and processing piles of paper. This was not my idea of a paperless navy! After about a month of never-ending paper shoving and green-screen gazing, my brain said, there must be a better way to manage this mess I'm doing... I researched it and came up with a plan... Unfortunately, MAC's were not an option. The Navy would not allow those little friendly computer faces to peer upon us warmly. I think they thought Steve Jobs was a spy and each of those smiling faces reported back to him... Ok, its MY thought, so leave me to my dreaming... Anyway, I convinced the RO that I needed another computer... with a screen NOT of green, but of 15 more colors! Oh wonder of wonders! Green become so much less obscene when replaced with colors like white on blue, yellow on black... and then we began to experience flash backs of the sixties with colors like red on cyan, green on red and other mind throbbing combinations that sometimes made you actually beg for the old simple green screen. Then Word Star died... Hurray! It was replaced with WordPerfect, Quattro-Pro and other programs that further alienated one's brain. WordPerfect definitely wasn't... perfect... The F-key phenomena was here to stay... in-fact I think that’s were the F-word came from... NO not THAT one! The other 10 or 12. We all learned that F1 was help, but not the sort we longed for... I was always searching for the right F-key combination that would forever free me from the scourge of key strokes that left each document I typed forever muddled with hidden codes, that caused my work to be printed in any manner other than what I wanted. Sideways, backwards, bold instead of regular, small instead of big, sometimes letters printed over the top of each other. Weird acronyms like WYSIWYG meant nothing to me... (What You See on screen Is What You Get on print). I seldom ever saw what I printed look like the stuff on the screen. It was a conspiracy… Bill Gates was an alien spy. He was secretly controlling my computer, making it print anyway he wanted, just to test my human ability to not succumb to the urge to pummel my keyboard into pieces. I wanted my MAC with MACWrite… (crying). It liked me… It was cool. I could print anything I wanted, anyway I wanted. But again it was not to be. I would soon learn that(in monotone voice)“Bill Gates is my friend”, “I love Microsoft”… And so I continued to learn the ever growing and ever demanding world of Bill Gates…

Soon the MAC became a distant memory and the F-key became my tool to rule the computer. I beat my f-keys daily, pounding away at endlessly, often smiling at the ease of which I enslaved them and drove them to my bidding… MAC came by several times in my life, but it was too late for them, I was now a staunch “PC’r”. No MAC would ever smile upon me again with that useless smirk trying to convince me that PC’s were unfriendly, difficult to master and that all PC software required a total relearn to understand them. I had the manuals and the library to prove that PC’s were great! I had become a true Nerd. I was indoctrinated.

 It is funny how after all these years, I look back and see that MAC’s are still smiling as they did back then, the software is still basically built around the same ideal of simplicity and that the PC world, while it has almost eliminated the need to F-key yourself into oblivion, the software is anything but simplified. The manuals and libraries have long since been sent to the landfill, Software no longer comes on floppies… Instead of WordStar on one big floppy disk, now we get MS Word and accompanying programs on 4 or more CD’s with no paper manuals. Software comes in a box so small now that the price you pay almost makes you wish for the original huge boxes with the enormous volumes of manuals, just to make it appear as though you are getting your moneys worth. Not that we would actually read the dusty things...

 I still have an occasional print job that isn’t WYSIWYG, I still have to pound my F-keys on occasion, I still don’t own a MAC and have no less than 11 PC’s around the office and home upon which my family and I pound out our letters, play our games and cruise the endless number of computers out there that are mostly PC’s making up the World Wide Web. It takes 2 PC’s to make the Sumter website exist not including this one I’m typing on, that I manage the site with. I am a PCer. MAC will never be able to win me back over. There are too many wanna-be PCer’s out there, floundering in F-keys, lost in the search for manuals written in a language that only Nerd’s like myself are willing to interpret for them, not that we read them either...

 I have dedicated myself to the never-ending task of answering the call for help from f-key abusers and other less fortunate PC users who are also in search of the perfect PC. Fabled to be able to smile at you, print what you see, F-keyless, and without the knowledge or ability to crash, become diseased and not require you to gut it, overhaul it, or bury it months after you adopted it. But then there is that uncanny resemblance that PC's have to women… Oh never mind… That’s a losing battle too.

Charles East, Site Administrator