Technology in the newsroom

So many memories ...

While in college in the 1990s, I did an internship at a paper that had a display case in the hall with a photo of every employee and their name and start date below them. The place was still doing paste-up and all the guys in the composing room, running around late at night with Exacto knives in their hands, had been there since the Kennedy Administration. I've always wondered what happened to all of them when the paper went to Quark.

The SE used to go back to the composing room to cut stuff to make it fit and he'd routinely chop out paragraphs with first reference info, making stories incoherent. That was always fun.

One paper I worked at in the late 1990s was still using the Trash-80. On many occasions, I had to venture far away from the office with no way to connect the damn thing to a phone line. I wrote on the Trash-80 and dictated many a story back to the desk from the payphones in front of various fast food restaurants and 7-11s. I know there was probably a way to connect it to the pay phone, but nobody at our place knew how.

One night, I was on the desk and one of our other guys was dictating from a payphone in the hinterlands with the Trash-80 and he was running off batteries, which were dying. And he kept saying "come on, baby, come on" basically praying the thing didn't die completely before he could finish. It was awfully hard not laughing in his ear on the phone.

I started to feel old when I went to the Newseum in D.C. last summer and saw a Trash-80 behind glass in a display.

 

I have seen Trash-80s fly out of press boxes. I think that's really why they put the nets up.

 

When I started out, we paginated using PageMaker but used PMTs for art. Before I left, we had started scanning photos in and importing. We printed all pages in tiles and pasted them up since we didn't shoot to negative.

My first two daily jobs were full pagination using Quark, then I went to a paper that was stuck in the 70s -- dummy sheets, pica poles, Xacto blades, LeafDesk, the whole schmear. It was an eye-opening experience. (In fact, paginating was a firing offense there.)

Surprisingly, when I went back to a paper with Quark, I picked right up where I left off and didn't have to adjust at all. Switching to InDesign was rough, though.

The deadline at the paper I'm at hasn't changed in about 10 years. We got a new Panther that burns plates directly a few years ago, so that bought us an extra 15 minutes or so.

 

The best postgame meltdown I've ever seen did not involve a coach. It involved a Houston sportswriter on deadline and a Trash-80. The words "YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKER" were a oft-repeated part of the dialogue.

 

IIRC, the Trash 80/100/200s only had about 20K of usable memory for writing stories. That's 20K total, which meant that you could only store about 100 column inches of copy before you had to start deleting old files.

No problem for handing a couple of H.S. football games on the weekend, but frustrating for multi-day assignments. I ended up being the first guy in out newsroom to buy the external hard drive, which let you save to 3/25-inch disks.

BTW, Bill Gates wrote the operating system (MS-DOS), which of course was completely incompatible with subsequent operating systems.

 

At my first newspaper stop in '82, when you typed a story, you saved it to a skinny yellow tape that was a series of holes. The tape was driven a couple miles to the production facility, strapped into the typesetter and copy that was ready to be waxed came out.

I still have a pica pole and proportion wheel in my desk. The young pups wonder what they are. I must say that pica poles make good back scratchers - and knowing how to use a proportion wheel still is a good skill to have.

Thank God we don't use Xacto knives any more. Many moons ago, as I was turning a corner, a keyliner was turning the corner, too. She was carrying galleys and had a knife in her hand. The knife cut through my new jeans and caused a cut that needed six or seven stitches. I was about six inches from castration (I'm not kidding).

At least the company paid for the trip to urgent care and for a new pair of jeans.

 

Line gauges (I refuse to use the term pica pole...) make great backscratchers.

 

And cutting cake. We have had a lot of going-away cakes over the past couple of years.

 

Not to get pedantic, but the TRS-80 ran on TRS-DOS, which was developed by Tandy and only licensed from Microsoft, not developed by them. Much as I love bashin' Mr. Gates, he can hardly be held responsible for anything wrong with the TRS-80 and its operating system.

If you want to blame anyone, you can blame Radio Shack--which is the same company, following an official name change in 2000 (TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack, BTW).

 

For what they were, TRS-80s were incredibly dependable and durable. Only problems seemed to come when hooking them up to a phone.

 

You had to move the bed out of the way and plug directly into the phone jack in the wall. Not plug into the back of the phone. It worked fine.
We had a problem at the Aloha Bowl, we were in a bank of rooms in the older section of the Hilton Hawaiian Village and the phone line came directly out of the wall, no plug. So we talked a bellhop into letting use one of the renovated rooms just to send our stories.