MY LIFE THROUGH MY KEYBOARD AND ELSEWHERE
Ever since primary school I've been a Science Fiction fan, mostly thanks to my older brother Jim who regularly bought SF magazines home. I'd always had visions of writing something myself, but the sheer mechanics of using a mechanical typewriter were quite sufficient to deter me until the early 80s, when I bought a Sinclair Spectrum computer, my first introduction to the magic world of word processing.
Not that I wasn't experienced with writing. Soon after I started as a trainee electronics technician with Hills Telefix in Brisbane in 1972 I became involved in their technical training program, which gave me my first taste of proper technical writing. Mostly I wrote stuff out by hand which was then typed up onto "spirit duplicator" stencils by office "typists". This was a very old in-house publication technology that was completely supplanted by cheap photocopiers within a few years. Basically, whatever was to be "duplicated" was first typed (or hand written or drawn with a special sharp stylus) onto special waxed paper sheets . This bashed or scratched holes through the wax coating, allowing ink to seep through to a sheet of paper below. The stencil was fitted into a special assembly that formed it into an endless belt affair, and as the belt was rotated by the attached handle, it would automatically grab fresh sheets of paper, run the ink onto them and then neatly stack them, very much the way a modern photocopier does.
There were two main players in the spirit duplicator industry, Roneo-Vickers and Gestetner, and such documents were often said to be "roneo-ed off". Just about every educational instution and reasonably-large office had at least one spirit duplicator, and more well-heeled outfits had electronic stencil cutters, which could electronically scan pre-printed material and automatically burn the holes in the stencil with an electric spark. Although it was a bit less convenient, this gave pretty much the same functions as a modern photocopier.
In 1982 I bought a Sinclair Spectrum computer, which was a revolution for me. Fitted with one of Sinclair's proprietary "microdrives" ( a sort of cross between a tiny cassette tape and a floppy disk, with a capacity of a whopping 60 kilobytes!) I was able to run their "Tasword" word processor. Crude though the setup may have sounded by today's standards, with my dinky little one-piece computer with its rubber keyboard, for the first time I was able to write like a pro, and with the aid of a daisy-wheel printer borrowed from work, I could turn out professional-looking copy.
However this still didn't really give that much advantage over other writers, since I still had no way of submitting copy electronically. (Ironically, the first thing I ever had published - in "Electronics Australia" magazine in 1981 - was an article on a cheap way of upgrading the memory of the Spectrum's "grandfather" the ZX80! That was laboriously typed out on paper, on an 1930s vintage "Remington Noiseless" mechanical typewriter, one of the many things I left behind in New Zealand and later regretted). In those days, when electronic submission was done at all, it was nearly always done over telephone lines via an extremely slow modem, (we're talking 300 bits per second, not kilobits!) You had to do it that way, because there were so many incompatible data storage systems being used.
Actually, it wasn't until 1989 when I bought my first PC (as in IBM PC clone) that I finally has access to medium that would allow me to submit written material conveniently and economically, via the magic medium of the 360K 5 1/4" floppy disk!
Within a month of this momentous purchase (12MHz PC-XT with 640K of RAM, 14" CGA colour monitor and Star NX1000 colour dot-matrix printer!) I had started on the novel "9:30 Thursday" which this site is named for. I thought I could knock it over in a few months, actually it took me nine years before I was ready to submit it to a publisher! (Although admittedly, the 360-odd page book is really two novels joined together).
By that time I'd well and truly missed the boat. Every man and his dog now has a word processor and your chances of getting any publisher to even LOOK at the manuscript of an unpublished writer are roughly the same as winning $9 million in the lottery!
I really don't hold out much hope of getting anybody to look at my novel, but all the relevant information is here if anybody happens to be interested.
Over the past year I've made some extra cash writing technical articles for the Australian electronics magazine "Silicon Chip". My first effort was an article commemorating the 30th anniversary of the introduciton of colour TV to Australia in 1975. That was published in the March and April issues, and will be reproduced here in due course. In August 2005 they published another article of mine on the development of the Atomic bomb, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. They did condense my original submission rather severely, and so I've presented the full set of articles on this site in the "Science" section.
Over the years I also contributed material to "The Serviceman" column in Silicon Chip's now-defunct rival Electronics Australia. All of these I could find will be on here too in due course.
