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Ahead of his time
May. 27th, 2004 10:07 amJust been reading something Damon Knight wrote thirty years ago, at least a decade before the term "word processor" entered common use. It's clear he'd seen a glimpse of what was coming and how it would change the process of writing, though I'm glad computer generated text hasn't had much success.
"I once had a Frieden Flexowriter on trial - a marvellous machine, with a tape cutter and reader built onto the chassis of an IBM Model A electric typewriter. It cuts an 8-channel tape, and you can feed the tape back in, make any corrections you like while the machine cuts a second tape, then feed in the second tape and watch it vhunter away by itself churning out the final copy. If I were very rich, I would own one of these machines, but they are expensive and delicate. Ideally, every professional writer would own one of these now, and would furnish a copy of the tape to be used in typesetting along with each manuscript. Later we ought to have computer terminals which would do the same thing more efficiently, and would also provide instant information, correct our misspellings and typographical errors, etc. With sophisticated programming they might do a lot of the routine work of writing as well; in some kinds of commercial writing there's no reason why they shouldn't do most of it."
- Damon Knight in Hell's Cartographers, 1975.
"I once had a Frieden Flexowriter on trial - a marvellous machine, with a tape cutter and reader built onto the chassis of an IBM Model A electric typewriter. It cuts an 8-channel tape, and you can feed the tape back in, make any corrections you like while the machine cuts a second tape, then feed in the second tape and watch it vhunter away by itself churning out the final copy. If I were very rich, I would own one of these machines, but they are expensive and delicate. Ideally, every professional writer would own one of these now, and would furnish a copy of the tape to be used in typesetting along with each manuscript. Later we ought to have computer terminals which would do the same thing more efficiently, and would also provide instant information, correct our misspellings and typographical errors, etc. With sophisticated programming they might do a lot of the routine work of writing as well; in some kinds of commercial writing there's no reason why they shouldn't do most of it."
- Damon Knight in Hell's Cartographers, 1975.
