Jumping from paper to bits and bytes
How can you tell when you’ve really made the jump from “hold-in-your-hands-paper” to “batteries-not-included-digital” – for me it came in a few phases.
Phase 1 – from back in the early 80s, I never handwrote anything – well except when I absolutely had no choice. And of course, this explains why I’ve had many art nouveau-collectors approach me to buy my painfully scribbled shopping lists for tens of thousands of dollars.
Phase 2 - I recall when I was in university back in the early 90s, sitting through lectures (well, sometimes sitting, mostly sleeping), I used an Amstrad NC 100 – a little micro-computer for typing my notes. It had about 8 lines x 80 columns of LCD, it was completely flat and had a jaw-dropping memory capacity of about 64kb.
Of course, all my pen-toting university compatriots used to look at me with both awe and jealousy – at least that’s what I thought until I started receiving death-threats. You see the keyboard was cleverly engineered in such a way that each tap of a key replicated the sound of a shotgun firing both barrels simulataneously — or so it seemed in the middle of a pin-drop-deafening-style lecture hall.
FWIW> Today’s students would probably use an ASUS Eee PC for the same sorts of high-speed, lightweight editing activities
Final Phase – I had a postal delivery just yesterday, and the rep had forgotten his pen. He asked if i had one, and after 15 apologetic minutes of searching around the house, I realised i didn’t have one. It was only a few hours after he left that I did find one, and the only reason I had this was because it had the unique feature of containing a 1gb USB key within the pen barrel.
Now that was the point of my self-realisation — and why I’m pretty sure no OCR technology will ever have any luck with my handwriting…













This article made me giggle. Reminds me of my friend Mel who is attached to her laptop – i’ve never seen her use a pen in the two years i’ve known her. I wonder if we will all get to this stage
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