Wielding a Red Sword Read online

  I am an ornery cuss. I refused to take no for an answer. I discussed the matter with my wife, and she did some research in the computer manuals and discovered that the Rainbow is more sophisticated than it seems. It is an international computer, with fifteen different keyboards, so that the needs of foreign languages can be served. [5:15 after horsefeeding, etc. That guy did not phone back, as I thought would be the case. I looked at the Waldenbooks interview transcription and can see how imprecise my speech is; I'm much better as a writer. But the one doing the transcription isn't much, either. When I said "inversely proportional to its merit," it was transcribed as "inversedly fortunal towards marriage."] Any of those foreign keyboards could be set up on our system, merely by going through the proper procedure—and several of them had different symbols on the lower and upper cases of those two keys.

  Well, now. Why not change over to a foreign keyboard, then change that to Dvorak via SmartKey? It seemed possible, but there was a problem. (There's always a problem!) Those foreign keyboards didn't have all the same letters as the American one. Instead they had things like ¿ and Ø and ñ and £. How could we put our letters in a keyboard that didn't have them all? Well, there was a way; we would have to bring our letters across, exchange them with the foreign ones, and then rearrange them into Dvorak. My wife believed she could manage that. She's the computer expert in the family, having once earned our living as a computer programmer, back before home computers existed. (Such recollections tend to make us feel unconscionably old.)

  But there was another problem. Some of the foreign keys were set to their own private programs, and could not be changed. Thus we might get our capital Ws and Vs, but lose other letters entirely. So I did some research of my own, poring over the representations of the fifteen keyboards, and discovered three whose programmed keys were not in any critical place. I chose the Finnish keyboard, whose special keys were in the upper comers, bracketing the numbers row. We could work around these, as the symbols there were not critical. We would have to move the American +/= key in one space, because that was in the upper right comer and we needed it, and leave the Finnish `/^ key in its place. Also, there were two Finnish keyboards: one for the Correspondence Mode and the other for the Data Processing Mode. The one with the symbols I needed was the Data Processing Mode.

  Then I went to work compiling an exchange chart for every letter on the keyboard, as capital and lower-case. Ninety-six exchanges in all—about half of the total on the keyboard. It took me hours. Then my wife got into the guts of the reprogramming of the keys and made the changes, and lo! it worked! We had what was probably the first complete Dvorak keyboard on the Rainbow. No longer did I have to head out into the hinterlands of the Function Keys to find where they had put my capitals.

  So I am now typing this Note on the Data Processing Mode of the Finnish keyboard, with certain letters imported from the American keyboard, configured to my special version of the Dvorak layout. Naturally I sent a smug letter to SmartKey telling them how to do likewise. I love it when I, an ignoramus, can tell the experts how to do the job that stumped them—and be right. (No, they did not reply. For some reason I can't quite fathom, experts don't seem to like having me show them up. I wonder whether they will give us credit, when they revise their procedure and their manual? Don't be concerned; this self-congratulatory Note will be seen by the folk who count. Namely, you readers.) (Except for that reviewer who fell asleep early in the Note. No, don't jog his elbow; let him suffer. His face is in the book, and the print is transferring itself to his cheek, backwards. You will be able to recognize him by the steam rising from his review of this book.)

  One other thing, before the next reader falls asleep. I mentioned power failures. We have them here by the gross, as we are deep in the forest, at the very end of the line, literally. I broke into the computer by typing letters—I have them by the gross, too—and when the power bunked twice in one hour, erasing me both times, my blood pressure made like Old Faithful. "I can't work this way!" I told my wife, who had been showing me how to work the buttons. So we quit in disgust and retired to the house. A storm was building; evidently lightning strikes farther up the line were responsible. And in the next hour that lightning found the range and struck right by us and sent a devastating surge along the line. It blew out our good color TV set, and a burner of the electric stove, sending a shower of sparks at my daughter Cheryl; and the timer on our water heater (trees overgrow our solar water heating system, and it sprang a leak, so we had to go back to electric, but we turn it on by the timer only two hours a day); and several components of the Atari computer system my daughters use for games and (before the Rainbow and that lightning strike) for word processing; and all the light bulbs that happened to be on. It put splotches of color on the screen of the Atari monitor and another TV set that weren't even turned on. It raced up the two-hundred-foot extension to my study and put my two all-wave radios halfway out of circulation (there after they would tune in only the closest, loudest stations). At the very, very end of that line was my new, three-dayinstalled Rainbow system, the obvious target.

  And the surge petered out just at that point. Having wastefully expended its energy taking out all the sidepieces, it lacked the strength to do the job it had come for. Ten thousand dollars' worth of computer emerged unscathed. I think. It is true that it tends to garble the recorded size of files, claiming they are bigger than they are, which has caused me some problems in judging the length of novels. But I think that's a software defect.

  But the only reason that system had been turned off—for it surely wouldn't have survived if it had been on—was my disgust at getting erased twice in an hour.

  I may be a slow learner, but that got through to me. Forthwith we ordered a UPS box—Uninterruptible Power Supply. Not only did that protect us from power failures, by providing ten or more minutes backup power, it also protected us from power surges. And that box has saved us many times since. In fact, now we own three of them. At $500 per, they aren't cheap, but we do need them.

  Actually, my computerization isn't as isolated a phenomenon as this may have made it seem. There is a fannish and a social aspect. Back in OctOgre of 1983 I was co-Guest-of-Honor with Richard Adams (Horseclans) at the science fiction convention NECRONOMICON. I receive about one invitation to a convention a month, and I turn them down because I'm busy writing and I don't like to travel; Del Rey Books got me to the ABA convention in Dallas in 1983 by bringing my whole family along, but that Satanish device is unlikely to work again and I think that niore or less covers my out-of-state traveling for this decade. NECRONOMICON, however, was in Tampa, where we often go anyway, so I agreed to attend, and I brought my daughters, then aged thirteen and sixteen. Naturally they got hooked on conventions, and thereafter they attended them without me.

  Well, the fan GOH was Bill Ritch, an expert in DR. WHO, video cassette recorders (VCR's), computers and such. Bill is a huge, harmless, teddybear of a man who likes people. I met him and talked to him about this and that, and evidently my daughters did too, for two months later, the night before Christmas, he showed up for a visit. He was just passing through on his way to Miami. But he had come down from the north—that is to say, Atlanta, Georgia—and naturally he brought the cold weather with him. The temperature dropped steadily and was freezing by the time he got ready to go. He had it in mind to drive overnight in his unheated car.

  At this point our parental instincts got the better of us, and we prevailed on him to stay the night and resume travel in the morning. Indeed this was wise, for it dropped to Florida-record levels that night: the coldest December ever, for the state. By morning it was 15°F on our carport. We were comfortable, of course, for we have a good wood stove. As it happened. Bill had a VCR with him that he was taking to his folks in Miami. So he hooked it up to our TV and showed us Thriller and Blade Runner and such. That was our first direct experience with a VCR. Later Bill sent us literature on the subject, and we bought a Sony 2700 Betamax. Thus it was Bill
who got us into video, and that has certainly brightened a number of what otherwise would have been dull TV evenings. More recently we got a video camera, using it to record the talks I give at local schools and such. For the first time I have been able to see myself as others see me, watching myself on our own TV. I'm sort of angular, and my voice seems somewhat nasal; believe me, I come across better in an Author's Note than I do in person. (Sigh.)

  Bill showed up periodically thereafter. I told him how I was unable to computerize because of the keyboard problem, and he told me ofSmartKey and the Digital computers. Thus he was directly responsible for the manner I obtained my present setup, which I suspect is the best currently available for a serious writer. No, I promised not to go into tedious detail, and please don't deluge me with letters claiming that IBM or Kaypro are better; I was late coming into this equipment, but I knew what I wanted, and my needs are specialized. Computer companies have very little notion of the needs of novelists, which is why it is necessary to pick and choose carefully. Even the reviewers of software are ignorant in this regard. I read one who condemned a program because it defaulted to overstrike. That is, when you want to correct a typo, you can simply strike over the error, anywhere in the text, without messing up anything else. That's vital for a typoprone writer like me—but you can't readily do it with the type of program that reviewer recommended. My program can readily be changed to a different default, when I want it.

  The software program affects the computer the way personality affects a human being. What counts is not merely what is done, but how it's done. The term "userfriendly" is no joke; if you think of the computer for a moment as a big dog, the user-friendly program will cause that dog to wag his tail and slurp your hand when he meets you, while the other type of program would cause him to consume your left buttock. Some programs are menudriven, and some are command-driven. With the former you can't do anything without having to get into the menu, which is a list of available tasks to choose from. That can get annoying when all you want to do is correct a typo you happened to see in the prior sentence. With the latter you can do it directly by typing the correct code—but that means you have to memorize a squintillion complex codes. That, too, is annoying. I suspect the best programs are compromises, with simple commands buttressed by simple menus for the less-frequent tasks. I started out with what came with the system: The DEC-approved Select-86 word processor, menu-driven. I typed my first novel on that, which happened to be But What of Earth? that I was restoring to its original condition for republication, together with twenty-five thousand words of comment on the nature of the (abysmal) editing it had received before. I soon discovered what DEC didn't know about the holes in its own program; whoever approved it had never, for example, tried to use the double-spacing setting or tried to follow the written instructions on how to remove a hard-carriage-return. But the same user-friendly DEC man who had put me on to the amber screen monitor—that's the one that doesn't give you eyestrain—put me on to the PTP text processor, and I composed (as opposed to retyping) the first novel, Golem in the Gears, with that one. Then we figured out the Finnish-keyboard device, and I composed the first science fiction novel (as opposed to fantasy), Politician, with that.

  Now I hear some of you clamoring about why should I settle for a text-processing program no one ever heard of, instead of going first-class with WordStar or Word Perfect. Well, here is another thing that the industry has been slow to understand. The ideal word processor is not the one that tries to do all things for all users, in the process becoming monstrously complex and burdening most users with complicated peripheral features they seldom or never use. That's like selling a Mack truck to a housewife for her weekly shopping. The ideal is the one that does the basics readily, is easy to learn and understand, and allows the individual to program his own specialized functions. PTP is the easiest of all the programs I have considered to learn and use, and its macros enable me to set up just exactly those specialized features, like downarrows or my bibliography boilerplate, that I want—and no others. Thus it is simple and sophisticated and personalized, exactly as I am. Oh, I admit there are a couple of things it lacks that I would like, such as "windows" (those enable you to call up another file and view it while keeping the current one on a parallel screen, so you can verify whether you said something in a prior chapter that you are about to say here) and the ability to address my full 256K memory (it addresses only half of it). Every so often I bug the maker, and I suspect that in due course he'll come through with improvements. But basically I feel that I have here a setup, hard, soft, and firm, that would be the first choice of any newcomer who could afford it, if he but knew its features. Oldtimers are lost; once a person has taken six months to master WordStar, he's not about to throw that away and spend two days to master PTP.

  Meanwhile Bill Pitch phoned. A store in Atlanta was having a half-price sale on Rainbow 100's. Were we interested? We were. We sent him the money, he bought Rainbows for us and his own projects, and we set up the duplicate system at the house, where it would be warm in winter. Thus the fourth novel. Red Sword, is the first on that second system. Thus, within nine months of computerization, I have done three and a half novels (the first being a rework), which is a fair pace even for me, and yes, I am now thoroughly addicted to the computer. But you can see how closely it ties in with personal connections.

  One thing I considered for this novel was changing the operating system. You see, there are levels and levels of these things, even in software. The computer system might be likened to a car, with wheels, engine, doors and such. The software can be likened to the controls that direct the progress of that car. But obviously you don't do things directly; there is a series of linkages between your hands and the engine, and between the engine and the wheels. So I think of the word processor as the layout of the steering wheel, gearshift (or automatic shift), ignition key, dials and such, while the operating system is the gearbox below, the steering mechanism, the clutch and such. You can have a similar layout and the same type of engine as another car, but the intermediary linkages may be quite different, and the kind you want for Sunday morning driving might not be suitable for the racetrack. So with computer operating systems; they are largely invisible, but they are important, and some suit particular purposes better than others.

  The operating system I use is CP/M, obviously an abbreviation for an old retired naval man called Captain Manager. Captain M supplements his income by renting his house, which is a fine old edifice of some fifteen storeys (as he spells it) and a capacious cellar. Each floor contains six rooms and is provided with all the amenities of the domicile. Because the Captain never saw fit to adjust all the way to civilian life, he calls his boarders "Users" and he assigns them numbers. Thus User 1 occupies the first floor, and when he enters the building he must step into the elevator and punch out the code USER 1, and instantly he is there. Similarly for User 2, and on up to the one on the top floor, User 15. Some of these boarders sublet individual rooms, and these they reach by pausing in the elevator to punch out A, B, E, F, G, or H, which are the designations the Captain has coded for this building. Now you might suppose that this was an aggravating nuisance, but in fact it is very much to the advantage of the boarders, for each one had absolute privacy within his number and letter. All the furniture is set up exactly as he wants it, and the rooms are completely individualized. It is as if the rest of the building doesn't exist. The elevator has a Directory that can be flashed on a screen by typing the secret code word MAINT, and it will show a complete inventory of everything in the designated room on that floor. There may be hundreds of other items in the various other rooms and floors, but this Directory ignores them; they have their own Directories.

  What this means is that the Captain provides the ideal situation for a writer who has a number of projects going simultaneously and wants to keep them all distinct, without accidentally erasing one, but who also has teenage offspring that wish to borrow the machine for word-processing ho
mework. For the House of CP/M is my computer, as organized by that operating system. I had nightmares of a daughter turning on the computer, touching the wrong button, and erasing my past week's work. So I set us up with the House, and now the cellar (User 0) contains the assorted software programs including the good Captain M himself, while I have reserved floors 1 through 9 for business purposes, and two floors each for wife and daughters. Penny, who likes the view from the heights, has the top two floors, for example, and when she uses the computer she punches in User 14 or User 15 and there she is, with her margins set the way she left them, her macros ready, and all the files she has saved ready for her. When she punches the Macro 7 button she gets whatever she has put on it; when I punch the same button, down on User 1, I get my down-arrow. On User 3 that same button evokes my About-the-Author boilerplate. (A boilerplate is a set passage that can be inserted into a letter or other text without retyping; it can be very handy for answering the same question from different fans.) I would be quite lost on her floors, because I don't know her macros and don't understand the contemporary teengirl way of doing things. And she would not be at home on my floors, should she go to one by accident. And we don't snoop on each other; I visit her floors only by invitation, so she has privacy of correspondence, and of course she's not interested in my correspondence. Neither of us can affect anything on the other's floor from our own floor, so accidents are impossible. A family with fifteen or even sixteen Users could give each a floor, and each one could program each of the six rooms (four sections of the hard disk, plus the two floppy disk drives) differently, to allow for an infinite number of variations. Yes, infinite, because there is no limit to the number of floppy disks that can be used in turn in their drives, and the defaults are stored on the disks themselves. If a daughter takes one of my floppies by mistake and uses MAINT to check what's on it, it won't tell her, because it answers only to my User number. So it is as if we have several computers, and it's beautiful. We even have color-coded cases for the disks: Blue for Penny, Green for Cheryl, Red for my wife, and Black and Yellow for me. I suppose what I'm saying is that we have a family computer system in the most compatible way, and we all like it, and visitors (yea, even Bill Ritch) are impressed by our setup. Bill even took home a disk containing my macros, so that he can get little arrows and things, though I can't imagine what he does with them. (I picture him running about Atlanta, poking people with little arrows...)