Page 3 of Ten Years and Then…
Nora-September 10
Nora shuffled the pages of her Introduction to Modern Journalism assignment. Page one had to be in there somewhere.
“Here, look at mine,” Tammy said, seeing her frustration. Tammy Webber was a junior, and she’d taken pity on Nora when everyone else in the class had partnered up on this assignment. “And can you remind me why we’re even doing this in the first place?”
“Personalized news is the future of journalism. Isn’t that how Professor Williams said it? Although I’m not quite sold yet.” A blank screen with a blinking blue cursor didn’t really seem like a promising future. That wasn’t what she was supposed to be seeing, according to the instructions on page one. “I don’t expect HAL or anything, but a basic welcome screen or something would be nice.”
Tammy stared blankly at her. “Who’s Hal?”
Everyone knew that, even if they’d never seen the movie. Or not, apparently. “HAL-9000? From the movie? 2001: A Space Odyssey? He’s the evil computer who takes over the ship and kills everybody.”
Tammy shrugged. “I’ll take your word for that. But I see what you mean. The instructions definitely say we should see a menu.”
From somewhere behind her, Nora heard an exasperated groan. “I told Bob ten times to restart CompuServe.” Then there was a laugh, and the voice was louder. A male voice—a student, definitely. “OK. Sorry. Somebody didn’t do what they were supposed to do. But it’s easy to fix. Just type CSlaunch and hit enter. CS in capitals, launch in small letters, and you should be all set.” A pause, then it—he—spoke again. “And by the way, HAL was not evil. He’s just misunderstood.”
Nora did as she was told, and after a moment of whirring and beeping, the CompuServe logo appeared on her screen, followed by an instruction menu. She turned around to thank her mysterious helper, but he must have left—there was nobody else in the computer lab but her and Tammy.
Daniel, September 23
There were four professors standing over Daniel, one of them—Professor Feinberg—was the chair of the Journalism department. Under normal circumstances, he’d have felt intimidated, even more so because he was on their turf, in their department office.
But not today. He’d volunteered to come over, when his advisor had asked if anyone was willing to go and demonstrate to them what their brand new Macintosh could do. It might be their office, but right now, it was his turf.
Even better, he was getting his hands on not just a Mac, but a Macintosh SE, with a twenty megabyte hard drive. What would you even do with that much storage? It was unimaginable.
Professor Feinberg spoke up. “You really like this—this thing?” The man wore a bow tie, and looked like he belonged in an old movie—the crusty editor who bossed around the plucky young heroic reporters, maybe.
“I love it, Professor. And you will, too, once you see it in action. It’s going to change everything.”
There were disbelieving grunts from the other professors, and Professor Feinberg simply said, “Convince me, young man.”
Daniel pointed to the screen. “See that icon? PageMaker. Desktop publishing. Watch this.” He clicked it, waited for the program to start, and then opened up one of the tutorial examples. “This is just a sample document, so you can learn how the software works. You see?” He scooted back a little to let them see better. “Looks like the front page of a newspaper, right? Headline, big photo, articles. But say you want that picture smaller, and the article on the left to be two columns instead of one.” A few clicks, a couple of keystrokes and it was done.
“Just like that?” He glanced up at Professor Feinberg, who looked stunned. “That would take half an hour to do by hand!”
“Exactly,” Daniel said. “And that’s just scratching the surface of what you can do with this. Want to see more?”
They did, and they were suitably amazed. Just as he was about to step aside and let Professor Feinberg try it out, a voice—a girl’s voice—spoke out somewhere behind him.
“Did you see that? That was really cool!”
He froze. He knew that voice. He’d heard it—her—although he couldn’t think where. But when he turned around to see its owner, she was gone.
Nora, September 25
In three weeks using CompuServe, Nora hadn’t learned much about the future of journalism. But she had lost several thousand fake dollars at online blackjack, confirmed her incompetence at Wheel of Fortune and been hit on in a chat room by someone who claimed to be a millionaire from Argentina but who she was pretty sure was really a junior high school boy from Iowa.
She was about to call it an afternoon when she heard that voice again; the same guy who’d helped her get started her first day here in the lab. And the same one who’d dazzled Professor Feinberg with the magic of desktop publishing. He was in the other room of the lab, where the computers were all set up for word processing.
“OK, so if that happens again, do what I showed you.” There was a pause. “Yeah, exactly like that. But also remember to save every few minutes. I lost a fifteen page paper last year because I didn’t do that.”
Nora sighed. That was something that would happen to her. The only reason it hadn’t yet was that she hadn’t written a paper on the computer yet.
Ten minutes later, Nora was still listening to him—whoever he was—helping a girl who was not the world’s quickest learner. Although maybe that wasn’t fair. If her anonymous helper hadn’t told her what to do three weeks ago, she might still be staring at a blinking blue cursor herself. Maybe she should walk right over there and thank him. That wouldn’t be weird at all, right? Just good manners. But then, why were her palms suddenly feeling sweaty?
Sweaty hands or not, she was about to stand up and do exactly that when there was a sudden, horrible sound—a grinding, wheezing, metallic sound, and then the guy’s voice yelled in frustration. “God, Bob! I told you not to mess with the laser printer!”
So much for good timing. Definitely not the moment for an introduction.
