I've been thinking about the computers I've used for writing over the years, and remembering one in particular.
In about 1988, I persuaded the small non-profit organisation I worked for to buy an Atari 1040ST.
I was already something of an Atari evangelist. At home I'd replaced my Sinclair QL with an Atari 520ST, and had become convinced that this was the future. Our office computers were Amstrads running CP/M, so we weren't particularly tied into the IBM/Microsoft world. Apple Macs existed, of course, and were obviously rather wonderful, but for an organisation like ours a Mac desktop publishing system seemed impossibly expensive.
The Atari offered another way in. Not cheap, by any means. But within the realms of possibility.
We bought the 1040ST, a high-resolution monochrome monitor, a laser printer, and an external hard drive. I think the hard drive held 48MB, although after nearly forty years I wouldn't swear to it. What I remember much more clearly is that it was large, lived in a substantial metal box, and made quite a lot of noise. It was the first hard drive I'd ever used. After years of swapping floppy disks and fiddling with QL microdrives, having tens of megabytes just there seemed extraordinary.
And we bought Calamus.
Calamus was a desktop-publishing program, and for its time it was almost impossibly capable. It allowed us to lay out pages, choose typefaces, position text and graphics and produce material on the laser printer which looked, to our eyes at least, properly typeset.
The system was also spectacularly unreliable.
My recollection is that it crashed at least twice a day. This was not a machine on which you learned the wisdom of saving your work occasionally. You learned to save it almost compulsively. Every so often Calamus, Atari TOS, the hard drive or some mysterious interaction between them would decide that we'd done quite enough publishing for the moment.
But when everything worked, it felt like wizardry.
The important thing was not simply that our documents looked better. It changed what our little organisation could do for itself.
Until then, if we wanted a professionally printed leaflet, booklet or report, there was a whole part of the process which belonged to the printer. We supplied the words; the printer did the typesetting and page layout; proofs went backwards and forwards; eventually the job went to press.
With the Atari and Calamus, I could take camera-ready pages to the printer.
That phrase, "camera-ready", belongs to another world now. What it meant was that we'd done the layout ourselves. The printer didn't need to typeset it. Our laser-printed pages could go straight into the photographic process from which the printing plates were made.
It saved us money. Probably quite a lot of money over time.
I suspect that's one reason I remember that computer so fondly, despite the crashes. It wasn't simply a nicer way of doing something we were already doing. It gave a small organisation access to a capability that had previously belonged to specialists with expensive equipment.
There have been enormous improvements since then. The laptop on which I'm writing this is incomparably faster, has vastly more storage, displays millions of colours rather than monochrome pixels, and can produce a PDF without any ceremony at all. I don't generally expect it to crash twice before lunch.
I don't want the old Atari back.
Well, not entirely.
But I do miss something about that sense of discovery. Producing a page that looked as though it had been professionally typeset felt like an achievement. Hearing the hard drive spin up, moving boxes of text around a monochrome screen, and eventually watching a finished page emerge from the laser printer made the process oddly tangible.
Today I can create something technically far more sophisticated almost without thinking about it. That's progress, obviously. But perhaps one of the things I've been rediscovering in my recent experiments with simpler computers and plain text is that convenience isn't the only thing that matters.
Sometimes it's good to be able to see the joins.
And sometimes it's good, even after forty years, to remember when making a decent-looking leaflet felt like wizardry.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk