I remember hot type, turtles and such. Reading type upside down. Getting a
black bar on your necktie from leaning over the turtle while reading upside
down. Okay, I got into the business right after cold type had been adopted. But
the composing room foreman was still bitching about the change, and I heard
more hot-type stories than I can recall. That said, I got to make the
transition from paper tape to computer-generated type. They sent me to school
in Boston for two weeks on an all-expense-paid extravaganza.
Two four-foot towers contained in a climate-controlled, shielded room. We
called it the bridge. Sometimes I'd turn off the overhead lights just to watch
all the green, yellow and red lights blink and glow. Positively Star Trek. The
two units were for what we called concurrent redundancy. System operated on
DOS. I've got many times the computing power of that system on my desk, and my
room isn't even shielded. <g>
In my family, having a letter published in the New York Times elevates one to,
well, elevated status. I never had a letter published, but the sons of bitches
did steal my crowning achievement in print journalism. Not that anyone knows
it, but I was the journalist who broke the story about Waldenbooks taking
Salman Rushdie's _The Satanic Verses_ off its shelves. The manager of the store
in the town where I worked called me, asked me to come over, and when I did she
gave me _the_ hard copy of the order from HQ. My editor decided it was too much
of a story for our little podunk paper (after all, we still said "gotten"), and
sent it up to the Times (which owned us), and they printed it on the front page
as though it was their own.
Sons of bitches!
Then, pouring salt in the wound, when the company newsletter came out, they
gave my executive editor kudos for passing the story along, never once
mentioning the effing city editor, who acquired the damned story in the first
place.
Sons of bitches!
--Bob
On Feb 1, 2011, at 12:13 PM, Piers Hemy wrote:
> Truth be told, I put that in expecting you to bite, Bob. And if I didn't
> cling to the "ASCII-only" in email convention, I would have out a real
> digraph in. I admit to a soft spot for them - got me published on the
> letters page of The Times too. But that was when it was a real paper, hot
> metal, printed in London, 60 screen mono images, none of this full colour
> web offset regionally printed tabloid nonsense!
--
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