Word Play

Computers have done more than simply add some terms to the language. The astonishing thing is that this little box has brought about the greatest advance in human communication since Gutenberg invented moveable type, and yet it's become so ubiquitous we barely realize it anymore. On the one hand I can't imagine life without the Internet, and the ability to exchange e-mails with il professore sitting in a hotel suite in the Arab Emirates, and yet I remember well struggling with a friend to get our modems to calibrate to each other so we could send one-line messages between our computers a few miles apart. It seems a century ago that I "discovered" word processing with Wordstar and all the key combinations necessary for the simplest operations, back before "cut and paste." Back then most of my writer friends sniffed dismissively when I would proselytize about computers. "Never," one of them insisted, "I will never give up the satisfying thwack of the typewriter." I couldn't wait to throw mine out the window.