All a twitter?

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UPFRONT - Office equipment industry

Here goes, another refrain from. The Old Fart's Lament:

It was different back then, 41 years ago when I started in this business. To get a story into print, first I had to report it, scribbling notes on a pad, then pound it out on a manual typewriter. Before I could fully savor the masterpiece of prose--nay, sheer poetry--I had produced, it was snatched from my hands by the city editor, who proceeded to rip it apart at the point of a No. 2 pencil, fixing myriad mistakes in style, grammar and syntax, not to mention logic and fact, laboring like Hercules, had the gods conceived a fate as frightening as missing a newspaper deadline to hover over the hero's head. All this to ensure that The Daily Times-News--and in the process, the 19-year-old intern scowling over his shoulder--did not play the fool.

Then--the Burlington paper being too small to have a copy desk, where his scrutiny would have been seconded--he stuffed the edited copy into a pneumatic tube to be sucked upstairs, where a linotype operator keyboard-ed each letter again, his machine spitting them out in lines of lead type. Since every word that appeared in the paper flowed through their eyes and out their fingers, these were some of the best-read, most-literate people in the building. And nothing gave them more glee than to march downstairs to the newsroom and point out something the "professionals" had missed. The same went for those who built galleys of type--reading it backwards--into pages or who made the mats from which...