Writers at Work

[Muirium]

Terry Pratchett realised that multi-screen workstations could increase his productivity dramatically. As an author viewing previous documents, research information and other important reference material simultaneously speeds up the process of writing. Quad Vision Supplied a six output high end workstation system, 6 x High quality monitors and Vision Tree LCD display stand. Terry has written a number of his best selling novels on the system and wouldn't be without it.

Although, oddly enough, they don't feature the canonical 6 screen Pratchett setup on their page!


http://www.quadvision.co.uk/case-studie ... tchett.htm

He does seem to have a thing for serious looking boards, though. Kudos, he is one of our own!

[Madhias]

Would be a great feature like Terry Pratchett testing different keyboards. Or other writers. Oh, yes, of course we have one already here: Muirium!

[seebart]

this is one heck of a thread Muirium, nice pics. Too bad we can´t see exactly what keyboard Roger Ebert has there...

[Muirium]

Thanks. There's always stuff to add to this one, especially if we let in typewriters, like Hemingway's on his standing desk:



This is what's in my head when I work standing up, too. But mine actually looks like this.

Spoiler:

Retro!

[mr_a500]

Hemmingway's standing desk looks pretty unstable. You have to push hard with those manual typewriters and that typewriter looks like it's resting on a cardboard box.

[SL89]

That isnt one of his legit standing desks tho.

Normally he wrote by hand at them and as i remember he had a couple of them specially made.

I can't find sources for that right now, but that looks like an improvised writing station moreso then anything he usually had.

[Grond]

I call it staged. That typewriter will crash on Ernie's foot as soon as he hits the spacebar.

[kbdfr]

Nope.
Such a typewriter has its centre of gravity somewhere far back near the cylinder, and you cannot tilt it by just hitting the spacebar.
The more so as the spacebar requires almost no pressure at all: all it does is release the cylinder (which is under spring pressure) to let it go one step.

Good old hardware, this. A pity you youngsters never had to type on those

[mr_a500]

I call it staged. That typewriter will crash on Ernie's foot as soon as he hits the spacebar.

I'm sure it is staged. It would be a bit odd if he didn't know there was a Life photographer wandering around his house taking pictures. The photographer probably wanted that window in the background and said, "Just throw your typewriter up there and pretend to be typing something. Don't bother cleaning up all that shit on your bed. There's no time. I've got to get out of here and take a naked photo of Marilyn Monroe."

Just think of all the staged photos out there of "natural situations" where it would be impossible for the subject not to know he was being photographed. (bullshit "President doing serious contemplation" photos come to mind)

[mr_a500]

And Stephen King, naturally.

Without even searching, I think I identified the terminal. It looks like a Wang terminal (2236?):


(except his doesn't have the numeric keypad)

Edit: Yes, some actual searching confirms the Wang. Somebody even gave a talk about it:


...and if you're excessively interested, get the Wang 2200 series PDF here:
http://www.wang2200.org/docs/brochure/2 ... 0.3-81.pdf

[Muirium]

Ah, Wang. Best name of all computer companies, but so stymied by the rise of personal computing. They and Canon's Cat (made by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project at Apple) had some interesting ideas when your whole world was text. But it did not remain for long!

[xwhatsit]

That stuff (Canon Cat, "Mother of All Demos" et al) fascinates me; you may have noticed from my crappy GUI that I still very much inhabit that textual world. I've got some neat vim scripts with some neat Engelbart-style stuff. I know I'm peculiar enough to work in an area (software development) where I don't have to leave that 100% text system very much (my desktop is normally a dozen tiled rxvt-terms), but I'm not sure the modern GUI is actually much a productivity boon.

Certainly much easier to learn and pick up (something like vim/tikz/latex admittedly doesn't have the shallowest learning curve), but in terms of outright efficiency, once it's been learned it's brutally fast and places very little load or distraction on the mind (unlike the right/left hand shuffle to the mouse and back, clicking/dragging on weird skeuomorphic graphical shapes).

I wonder what your Arthur C Clarkes and Keith Roberts would be mashing away on these days. I don't see them being able to hold enough concentration to pull it off.

[Julle]

This may not be the best of pictures but this was my uncle, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu (probably more well known internationally [if at all] as Matti joensuu, because, you know, umlauty things scare people).

Anyway, he was a policeman. He served in violent crimes and homicide unit and later on in fire/arson investigation. He wrote 12 crime novels in his lifetime. He was acclaimed for the very realistic and touching storytelling where no absolutes of good and evil were present, except in the last two novels which seemed to reflect his personal struggles all too well.

I really wish I'd known him better but so did everyone else in his life, including his children.

Matti was the person to introduce me to the world of computers which is kind of funny because he himself was a hardcore typewriter guy. He was also a talented illustrator and cartoonist but unfortunately very little of that work remains.

matti+yrjänä+joensuu.jpg (114 KiB) Viewed 5127 times

[Muirium]

Intriguing…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matti_Yrjänä_Joensuu

The absence of clear division between good and evil is something I agree with completely. As an investigator he would have seen people's motives much more clearly than the nonsense we like to tell ourselves after the fact. I'll put him on my reading list. Got any recommendations?

@Xwhatsit: Clarke likely wasn't averse to GUIs, given his latter choice of hardware.

Spoiler:

He must have been heavily into computers, as we've seen him pose with many of them, far more than other writers. Have a look at page one.

I'm with you on the concept of text being the heart of the focussed computing experience. I love my text editor, with all its keyboard shortcuts and scripting. But I'm just not hooked up right to be able to pull off the text interface full time. GUIs better reflect how most of us think, especially those like me who can work around complexity but just seem to be dyslexic when it comes to commands and code. The way I read is at odds with doing code. It all blurs together, while a single misplaced comma or apostrophe in a paragraph of prose will usually catch my eye on first reading. Minds are curious things. I'm glad I have the interfaces available today, but I am often stymied by how text based programming is whenever I want to automate something, let alone roll my own software.

[Grond]

Very interesting, I see a couple of his books are translated in Italian, I'll read one of them when I get a chance!

[Julle]

I don't know what exactly is conveyed and what is lost in the translations of my uncle's novels. I have only read them in Finnish. Harjunpää ja rakkauden nälkä ("To steal her love" is the English translation I think) has always been one of my favourites. Harjunpää and the Stone Murders is another good one. The translated titles seem really odd to me, as the original title of the one I mentioned first is just "Harjunpää (the name of the main character) and the lust for love". The second one would have been just "Harjunpää and the son of a policeman".

There's a certain continuity in the books because they feature characters that remain. They are partly based on my uncle's real life coworkers. There's always something you've learned from one character in a previous story which you'll know will carry throughout the rest of the stories.

[mr_a500]

I wonder what your Arthur C Clarkes and Keith Roberts would be mashing away on these days. I don't see them being able to hold enough concentration to pull it off.

I wonder what Hemmingway would have thought of this:

[Muirium]

I shudder to think there are smart people who write for a living that still haven't found their way out from Microsoft Word…

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... t-die.html

[webwit]

I shudder to think there are smart people who write for a living and are fanboys of an evil company like Apple! I bet you use Apple AND google AND ebay AND paypal, and think Elon Musk is a pretty cool guy.

Apple fanboys always remind me of Apple's investor prospectus. Fan boys: "It ain't overpriced crap". Apple to investors: "Buy our stock because we're so successful at selling overpriced crap."

[mr_a500]

I shudder to think there are smart people who write for a living that still haven't found their way out from Microsoft Word…

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... t-die.html

Oh GOD how I hate Microsoft Word! Every time I was forced to use it, it was like I suddenly developed Tourette's Syndrome. I couldn't stop saying the word "fuck!" and my eye twitched uncontrollably in anger.

[webwit]

One only needs CygnusEd.

[mr_a500]

One only needs CygnusEd.

True.. preferably with dramatic music playing in the background:

[7bit]

Ideally, writers write in plain text (unicode if it can't be 7bit-ASCIII). This 'format' is the least problematic for the typesetters, no matter what system they are using.

Word and other WYSIWYG editors are bad, because people thing about formatting more than about content.

Funny sidenote:
Because Word used TXT as filename-ending in the 1980s, a texteditor I used back then chose DOC as ending for plain text files.


Now guess, what I still use for plain text files until today.

One only needs CygnusEd.

Wait! Why does it have GNU and Ed (the standard text editor) in the name and is even closed source?

[kbdfr]

Microsoft Word is (I am aware I'll be stoned for writing that ) a fairly decent tool if you know how to use it.

The problem is not with the software, but with people wanting to use it at once without first learning how to deal with it. Nobody would dream of just taking place in the cockpit of a plane and taking off right away, but that's exactly what they do with MS Word. Most people don't even know there is a "page ends here" function, and press Enter until a new page opens.

I remember correcting a document written by a student a few years ago. She did not know that footnotes are a special function and just wrote them (hundred of them!) at the end of each page after changing the font pitch, manually entering numbers. When she started correcting, the whole text moved and her "footnotes" appeared in the middle of the pages.
She cursed Word, of course, not herself

[7bit]

cat /dev/stones > kbdfr

...
I remember correcting a document written by a student a few years ago. She did not know that footnotes are a special function and just wrote them (hundred of them!) at the end of each page after changing the font pitch, manually entering numbers. When she started correcting, the whole text moved and her "footnotes" appeared in the middle of the pages.
She cursed Word, of course, not herself

She did right so!

Back on topic:
http://www.typewriters.ch/writers_typewriters.html

[kbdfr]

Back on topic:
http://www.greghocfell.com/album/ecriva ... -a-ecrire/

[Muirium]

Back off topic:

@Kbdfr Au contraire. This guy edits other people's Word docs for a living (French Canadian translator) and hates its desperate bugginess with a passion that only becomes clear when you see he's written about this for a decade!

http://www.betalogue.com/category/macintosh/microsoft

I used Word on OS X for a while when I switched (first and last money MS ever got from me directly) and although it actually looked pretty good compared to the Windows version of the time, it was a pile of crap for constantly getting in my way and scrambling my documents. After it finally destroyed a few dozen hours of my work, I rage quit it and have lost nothing ever since. Plaintext forever!


@Webwit

Come for the hardware, stay for the software. I tried many times to ditch Windows in my PC days, but could never live in Linux. OS X got me first time. The rare occasions I ever touch non-Apple computers, I am so palpably retarded and that I'm tempted to say "literally" even in Kbdfr's presence! But these days it's rarer than ever. The world's moving on from the brain dead computing of the 90s at last.

[webwit]

You mean good software like iTunes?

The world also have moved on from the 00s, and ironically now Apple is a follower. I wonder who they followed, killing skeuomorphisms and going for flatness.

[7bit]

Steve Jobs is dead, so is Apple.


A few weeks ago, at a garden party it was my task to bring a 'slide'-projector to work. Some images did not play, so I looked into it. There was an Apple machine and I thought MacOS X =~ BSD, but no way I could find the text-console, xterm or whatever, so no way to rename the images that did not play.

[Halvar]

I don't know ... There are some very valid points in that "Charlie's" article, but if MS Word is "computing of the 90's" then what's the great new 201x software or suite of programs that should be the MS Word of the 2010s for the everyday needs of students, secretaries, scientists, salespeople, engineers etc when they want to produce something that will go on paper, or something that should go to a range of media?

"Plain text" or markup languages can't be the answer to that. Remembering markup commands in your head and adhering to a syntax like a programmer? Putting illustrations in a special folder on your harddisk and writing a link and formatting commands into your text document? That's more like "computing of the 80's", isn't it?

For professional writers and journalists that have a well-designed publishing process or for mathematicians or physicists who have to learn TeX anyway that might be viable, but for everyday writing that is part of every knowledge worker job?

There's a lot to hate about MS Word, but the really good "Word killer" has not been found yet. What I see today is just way more fragmentation than in the 90's and only lip service to open standards.

What I write daily: protocols and documentation in Word, documentation in a Wiki, e-mails (often HTML-formatted), forum articles in BBcode, notes in Onenote or Evernote, notes in plain text .txt files, program code with opendoc embeds, short messages in messaging apps, some (little) documentation in TeX, and that's only the stuff that's basically text. Other popular text tool that I don't use, but others do, are Mac "Pages" or LibreOffice.

There is no other common denominator on all of these other than plain text with no formatting at all. I that supposed to be an advancement relative to the times where everybody used Word because texts meant printing paper and PC meant Windows and Gates was still an asshole?

I don't want Word back, I'd like to trash it rather today then tomorrow, and MS did some really unethical stuff to win that monopoly. They were the evil in "Don't be evil". But the versatile text processing software tool (or open standard that can be implemented by more than one software) for the John Doe of the 2010s has yet to be invented. Pages and LibreOffice don't even count, because they're basically the same as Word with a different sticker.