The Godfather: Peter Corris on changing technologies
A couple of technologies employed by writers and journalists, and thought highly of at the time, have become obsolete in my lifetime. One that comes to mind is the facsimile, which was cheaper and less complicated than earlier forms of transmission like the telex.
Nevertheless, the fax had several disadvantages – having a second telephone line was expensive, and having the machine work off a single line was often inconvenient. The print faded quite quickly, making storage difficult and a ‘junk fax’ – where an enormous screed of unsolicited material was sent – wasted expensive paper. Email has more or less wiped out the fax, although some businesses still carry a fax number; I doubt that many individuals do.
Email, whereby simple messages or long ones accompanied by large documents can be sent and received immediately still appears almost magical to me. It’s hard to see what could replace it. Texting, I should think, complements rather than supersedes it.
The manual typewriter was a marvellous innovation in its day with many benefits, including speed of composition over handwriting. Still better was the electric typewriter. It was a joy to have the carriage moved automatically and for there to be a correction function. The golf ball, replacing the sometimes troublesome arms of the manual keys, seemed the last word in efficiency. With the lighter touch required for the keyboard, electric typewriters were easier on the back.
The word processor of course dealt the death blow to the electric typewriter. I remember a friend coming back from his time at Stanford University in California in the mid-1970s, where he had held a scholarship that used to be available to Australian writers. He sang the praises of the machine, of which there were only a few at the university, and time on them had to be booked.
In a recent interview Michael Rowbotham conducted with US crime writer Michael Connelly at the Sydney Writers Festival, Connelly said that he’d never written on anything but a computer. He started his journalistic career in 1980, so evidently computers for writing had become widely available in the US between the mid-1970s and the end of the decade – a rapid takeover, as those of us working in newspapers in that period experienced.
Gone were the typewriters upended on the desks when not in use to provide more space and the triple-decker octavo copy paper. I wrote the first three Cliff Hardy books on typewriters but on computers ever after. ‘Primitive’, as Connelly described the early machines, they certainly were with their floppy discs and limited functions. Printing, with roller-fed perforated paper, could be a nightmare.
Advances since then have been many – all, I believe, reducing the physical effort of writing and letting the imagination work more freely. It’s hard to imagine what further improvements are possible. Computerised voice recognition systems have been around for some time and are presumably improving. An advertisement for one such system claimed that it enabled thoughts to become words instantly. It may be that young writers will embrace this technology but I prefer thoughts to become words via my fingers.
I’ve heard of writers, some very successful, who prefer to compose in longhand. This implies being able to read one’s own writing, which not all of us can. One thing I feel fairly sure of, no one who has written a book on a word processor has ever gone back to pen and ink.
