...this made printing, say, 20 pages of fiction very difficult...
Not as difficult as you might assume. Networked, heavy duty dot-matrix printers were what we had when I was in University (sic) and I worked for a term in the Arts Computing Office. It's amazing how practice (lots of papers to write) and a big flat table makes the task of bursting pages a pretty quick (and oddly soothing) process (ahhh ... ::slide slide:: ::zhnipp zhnipp zhnipp:: ::slide slide:: ... ahhh).
It was certainly quicker to burst pages than it was to debug your paper's markup to make sure that all the formatting, references, and footnoting worked out properly (ahh! GML!).
(Don't get me started on punch cards -- that's how I learned to program: thank God, I saw only one term in highschool of this, and then we moved on to Commodore PETs and got to use COBOL, BASIC, and PETAssembler.)
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Date: 2006-03-29 04:37 pm (UTC)Not as difficult as you might assume. Networked, heavy duty dot-matrix printers were what we had when I was in University (sic) and I worked for a term in the Arts Computing Office. It's amazing how practice (lots of papers to write) and a big flat table makes the task of bursting pages a pretty quick (and oddly soothing) process (ahhh ... ::slide slide:: ::zhnipp zhnipp zhnipp:: ::slide slide:: ... ahhh).
It was certainly quicker to burst pages than it was to debug your paper's markup to make sure that all the formatting, references, and footnoting worked out properly (ahh! GML!).
(Don't get me started on punch cards -- that's how I learned to program: thank God, I saw only one term in highschool of this, and then we moved on to Commodore PETs and got to use COBOL, BASIC, and PETAssembler.)