Software that's enjoyable ... software that's a drudgery

Posted by tightbeam
Mar 2, 2015 at 08:42 PM

Back in the early 1980s, I was publishing my first magazine (about multi-player postal games and the early computer games). I wrote most of the copy on legal pads and typed in submissions and author-supplied content - which came by post - on one of those “newfangled” typewriters that had a little single-line screen on the front where you could see several of the words you had just typed. I don’t remember the model name. If you caught a typo before the word left the screen, you could correct it before it hit the paper. Then everything had to be retyped into one of those monstrous Varitypers (a typesetting machine). ANY of the software that I use today would have seemed magical back then.