Brooks Peterson

Monday, Apr. 5, 1999

New computer system? Shoot, bring 'er on

   Faithful readers (and I am pleased to announce that surveys indicate our numbers are about to hit the double digits) (why do I say "our" numbers? because I'm not just the president of this column: I'm a client) . . .
   But I digress. You, gentle reader, may recall that I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a life-altering experience: I learned that I am a technician. It said so in the J.R. Polk City Directory for Corpus Christi: "Peterson, Brooks . . . tech." For "Technician." Shazam!
   This was of course your basic intellectual, psychological and even, perhaps, philosophical sea change, big time. I knew that something had changed - something irreversible and momentous.
   And the intervening days have only driven home that stunning truth.
   You think I'm kidding? You think I'm just desperately casting about late on Thursday evening for a Monday column topic? (Well, OK, you'd be right about that, but . . .)
   Consider this: The imminent introduction of a new computer system at this establishment bothers me not in the slightest. Pooh. Bring it on. I Am Technician. I laugh on new computer systems. I take gigabytes and chew them up into little pieces. I breathe RAM and belch Output. I interface. I Power Up - and from enviro-friendly renewable resources, at that.
   Maybe you think this is no big deal. Obviously, you have not experienced the profoundly disconcerting, if not downright ugly, things that can happen at the journalist/computer interface.
   Having long since lost the capacity to be embarrassed about such things, I can tell you without batting an eye that when I signed on with this outfit we were PC - Pre-Computers. Manual typewriters, copy paper, teletypes . . . We looked like a road show production of "The Front Page."
   That changed, of course. The first-generation computers on which we worked were great huge ungainly things which by today's standards were hardly more than word processors, and not very accommodating ones at that. One rumor, doubtless unfounded, was that the system had originally been designed to manage hospital inventories.
   Then came Generation II: sleek little jobs called, if memory serves aright, ETs. We whined, we balked, we groused - but eventually we got with the program(s).
   All of that, however, was but a warm-up for Gen III - also known, among some of the technophobes among us, as Generation @#*%!#. No more baby steps: This was the Real Deal, propelling us headlong into a strange and (again, to the technologically deficient) forbidding landscape.
   The machines weren't the problem: They're the same PCs many of you have at home: We've got full color video, electronic library, printouts that materialize with stunning rapidity (so long as the paper doesn't jam).
   No, what nearly sent some of us - all right, then: me - right over the edge was something called pagination. Back in the Middle Ages, people with Exacto knives used to take long strips of slick paper ("film," we called it), slap stick wax on the back of them and paste them onto big white newspaper-size dummy pages, which were then magically translated into words on newsprint.
   Now, with pagination, the computer does all the stuff that those Exacto-knife-wielding, wax-slinging people used to do. Trouble is, the computer isn't smart enough (yet) to do that without getting its marching orders from a carbon-based life form.
   I'll admit it: I was not a happy paginator - particularly when pagination at the Caller-Times was in its infancy. The strangest things happened: Just when you'd gotten a page all slapped together, the system would freeze, and you'd have to start all over again. And you know the big letters with which our editorials and columns (like this one) begin? We call 'em "drop caps," should you ever need to liven up your conversational repertoire . . . You'd be working away and all of a sudden your drop caps would disappear. Or, conversely, they might erupt all over the page, like spots on a Dalmatian.
   I can still remember sitting before the computer as such disasters unfolded, literally shaking with rage, incomprehension and loathing.
   But no more. This time, the transition's going to be smooth as glass, absolutely trauma-free. I'm actually looking forward to it.
   But then again, why wouldn't I? I'm a Technician these days. And Technicians don't whine.
   (You can reach Brooks Peterson by phone at 886-3772 or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com.)