Every day there's another day, and it's never like yesterday except in the general length, the fact that it begins at sunrise, and the fact that (in the English language, anyway) the name of the day ends in a y. These are all things that we take for granted, as well we should. Yet there are still mysteries to explore, depths to plumb, letters to forward, and cudgels to wield. Blogger has a built-in spelling checker, by the way, and Firefox has a spelling checker plug-in, so I knew "cudgel" was spelled correctly the moment I typed it.
Funny thing about that plug-in. A while back, I worked for a company that had helped revolutionize the newspaper publishing business. There was a time, difficult for today's messaging fanatics to imagine, when computers and typesetting were never mentioned in the same breath. No one had ever used the phrase "word processing," (good thing, too, since it's a fairly silly phrase) and putting out a newspaper was a labor-intensive process involving, among other things, molten lead. One of the companies that led the charge into the electronic frontier was System Integrators, Inc. They do not exist anymore.
I can't speak for Harris and Atex, neither of which exists in its original incarnation, but I do have a word or two to say about SII. They were the second largest purveyor of "computerized publishing systems" at one time. Most major metropolitan newspapers on the west coast used an SII system, either editorial, classified, or both. The "brown Coyote" terminal was ubiquitous, and was a favorite among reporters. It was designed for just one thing: newspaper editing. As a result, it did that incredibly well. Ever had a computer crash? I thought so. If your Coyote crashed, you might lose ten characters. Two or three words. That was it. The things were fanatical about saving keystrokes.
(unfinished, but posted anyway...)
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