Call me a dinosaur. I've used Microsoft Word 2007 for, well, 10 years. Before that, I used the 2003 version and, way before that, I used the DOS version.
The DOS version served me well when I created a 1,000-command macro that helped make editing six different publications possible. I've long ago forgotten how that worked, but it did, spectacularly.
I've never used WordPerfect, at one time the gold standard for secretaries and others who processed words. In between versions of Microsoft Word, I took a detour into a delightful word-processing program for DOS called Nota Bene. Used mainly by academics, Nota Bene made composing scholarly papers as easy as writing a letter home. I used it extensively when I taught creative writing to college students, one of whom asked me, on the first day of class, how fiction was different from nonfiction. In despair at the state of education in America, I gave up teaching soon after.
I'm a sucker for upgrades. The universe was created in stages _ version 1.0 was heaven in earth. Version 2006 was Twitter; version 2017 is for presidents who use Twitter as often as 10-year-olds to tweet to their friends. I've never used Twitter because I can't imagine anyone being interested in 140 words from me about anything. Readers of this column certainly can identify with that concern.
When a client of my freelance writing and editing business urged me to get the latest version of Word, so that I could edit documents with the same version they were created in, I jumped onboard. Amazon had the 2016 Home and Student version for $85. Who could resist?
It's been relatively easy to make the transition to Word 2016. The familiar ribbon is there, of course. I like how the comment feature has the author's name on it. Tracking changes is easier, and a link to Wikipedia can be added. Taking a screenshot is easier than in previous versions. But for my money, I don't think I would miss much by keeping the 2007 version. In fact, the kind of writing and editing I do would have been well-served by the DOS version of Word that was popular in the last century. Pardon me while I wax nostalgic about a world before Windows.
It was a world in which you had to know such arcane commands as "escape-transfer" to create Word documents. Words could be counted without elaborate pop-up windows. If I was using Nota Bene, I could create endless footnotes effortlessly. True, documents couldn't be formatted with color, but color monitors weren't available anyway.
As long as I'm taking a trip down the gravel road known as memory lane, I must say that I miss Linotype operators, the men and women at newspapers who set type one letter at a time in hot lead. I miss the world before spell-check, when proofreaders caught style errors, not to mention spelling errors of reporters' copy on deadline. When I was working for newspapers in my later years, I missed the clacking keys of Smith Corona and Underwood typewriters and the endless debates over which typewriter was better.
Where have all the glue pots gone? Along with scissors, glue pots were used to rearrange paragraphs in stories that didn't make much sense otherwise. Has anyone seen copy paper that comes in rolls these days? Those of us on the copy desk _ rim rats _ would joke that the reason city editors were so cantankerous was because they used copy paper in the bathroom, too.
Who could forget middle-age copy boys who made sure glue pots and whiskey bottles were filled promptly; the latter for lulls between editions. When I was interviewing for a copyediting job in Cleveland many years ago, I was very much under the influence when I was assigned to write a 1-column, 3-line headline on Russia's crackdown on alcoholism. My headline:
Soviets put
staggering
curb on vodka
But it wasn't just the headline that won me the job offer. It was keeping up with the copy desk chief as he downed boilermakers during our late-night lunch break. I wrote the headline after lunch.
Today, newsrooms are like insurance offices. No one shouts anymore. One city editor I worked with in my golden years of newspapering would climb on his desk and rage about spliced commas and mock lead paragraphs that were "lyrical." Reporters would shrink in their chairs. There were rewrite men and women who could take snippets of information from reporters in phone booths who were covering major stories and turn them into Page 1 stories that read as if the rewrite man had been there himself. Reporters always carried dimes for pay phones.
I miss publishers who would hand out $25 bonuses and turkeys for Thanksgiving _ publishers who would tolerate, even participate in, drinking heavily spiked punch-bowl drinks during newsroom holiday parties. I worked at a newspaper in California that had a fully stocked bar that was used to entice potential advertisers. A steady stream of current advertisers and politicians would find their way to the bar, too. The advertising directors in those days had to turn down new customers, papers were so thick with ads. Aside from sky-writers and broadcast, there weren't many other venues for advertisers. As one advertiser roared after he had visited the bar, "You can't cut a coupon out of a TV ad!"
Unlike today, cash showed up at the business offices by the truckload.
Reporters and editors below the executive level didn't get their hands on much of that money, and when working conditions became intolerable, there were strikes, which publishers wanted to avoid at any cost. I recall a situation at a newspaper in Minneapolis in which the union, whose contract expired at midnight, called for a walkout an hour before the ad-rich Sunday paper's presses were scheduled to roll. We got our raise, and the publisher made more than enough cash that Saturday night to pay for those raises. Those were days when newspaper pages were wide and the newspapers themselves were thick as columns on classical Greek temples.
But newspapers were doomed when the president of one of the best newspaper chains in the country said his worst fear was a service that had free classified ads. His worst fear was fulfilled when Craigslist was born.
Yes, I know I'm a dinosaur who wishes typewriters had never gone the way of Linotypes. And yes, I'm a sucker for upgrades. But in the fast and furious world of software, I'm still nostalgic for DOS 2.11 with its blue screen of death. Like bumper cars at county fairs, DOS 2.11 crashed often. If Windows had never been invented, I'd nonetheless be happy with DOS 2.11. But I was bug-eyed-gotta-have-it when Windows 3.0 changed all that. Grown up now, I'm stuck with the reality of using an upgrade that I didn't particularly want and pretty much don't need.
Writing this column with Word 2007 made me long for the DOS version, which was like a fine Scotch whisky, aged in oak casks on the Isle of Skye. Sic transit gloria.
