Published: Sep 11, 2024 by Richard Sezov
You have to understand, at this point in my life, I’d been building my own computers from parts for almost a decade. And even though I’d just purchased one from Gateway, that didn’t mean I didn’t keep upgrading parts of it. A new hard drive (and reinstall) here, a new video card there. Modem too slow? Install a faster one. No network card? Let’s add one. Buy a SCSI scanner; install a SCSI card to run it. That’s the way you did things back then. USB as a standard interface didn’t exist.
At this time, one of my computer science professors started attending my church with her family. Her husband, whom I hadn’t met before this, was also a computer science professor at my alma mater. He was (and I’m sure still is) a Unix-aficionado. I had played with Linux and gotten it to do some useful things, but it was still an alien environment to me, with very different workflows and assumptions.
For example, it didn’t seem important to Linux/Unix users to have a graphical desktop environment, and to do everything in a GUI. Instead there were window managers, which had to be set up manually and didn’t automatically find the applications installed on the machine. They felt like souped-up menus, like the Hard Disk Menu I used to set up for customers on DOS. And a lot of core applications had to be run in the terminal—in fact, it seemed like the window managers’ main function was to run multiple terminal windows, sometimes with a few graphical applications.
Linux had a plethora of editors that could manage plain text, but word processors? Few if none, at this time. Spreadsheets? Couldn’t find any. How was anybody supposed to get any work done in this environment? Was Linux just for coding? Was it just for replacing the Novell- and Windows-based file servers I’d used? Was it just for running web servers? Now I had met someone who could answer those questions for me.
At around the same time, Microsoft released Windows XP, with its activation servers. This was their effort to combat piracy of their operating system. XP, so they said, would take a snapshot of the hardware on your system and upload that to the activation servers. If you made a change to your computer, such as swapping out the motherboard, upgrading your hard disk, changing the video card, or adding some other hardware, Microsoft would assume, since your hardware changed, that you were pirating Windows XP by installing the same copy on another computer, and they would deactivate your computer. You could call and beg Microsoft to reinstate your computer, but that decision was up to them.
In my mind, this meant several things:
- Microsoft could reach out to my computer at any time, or my computer could reach out to Microsoft at any time and upload data to their servers.
- Microsoft had the power to render my computer useless from afar.
- I could not, therefore, upgrade my computer’s components as I’d been accustomed to doing.
- If my hardware snapshot could be uploaded without my knowledge, so technically could anything else.
I could only come to one conclusion: if I installed Windows XP, my computer would no longer be my own. Some part of it would belong to Microsoft. Additionally, I would never be sure I could trust my own computer.
On my personal computer, I have never used Windows XP or any version of Windows that came after it.
I went from dual booting Linux and playing around with it to actively seeking to use it full time. In my discussions with Professor Provine, I learned about the difference between word processing and text processing. He asked me this question: what would happen, 20 years from now, to the data I was entering into my proprietary word processing programs? Could I be sure I would always be able to get that data out?
I thought about my old papers, written in WordStar, now a decade gone. How long would conversion utilities be available? Would they convert cleanly into a modern format, complete with all formatting? I didn’t know, but I’d have to find out.
But, he said, that was just chasing your tail. You could convert to another proprietary format, only to have that fall out of favor and have to convert again. And again. There was a way to prevent that. His wife’s dissertation, he said, was written in plain text, in something called groff. No matter what happened, that dissertation would always be readable and editable; yet it had been formatted exactly to the specifications required by his wife’s dissertation committee, complete with images and illustrations.
He didn’t recommend groff to me; instead, he recommended I check out LaTeX, which he pronounced, “laytek.” Tools like these were why, on Linux and Unix systems, nobody cared so much about word processors. The text editors on Linux were among the most powerful available, and you could produce professional, typeset documents using only plain text.
Though this intrigued me, it felt like going backwards. In WordStar, I could type dot commands right into the text to set margins and columns, and then I could preview what the page would look like. LaTeX was much the same: type commands to set formatting and insert images, and then run a program to generate a PDF you could look at to see if your formatting was right. It wasn’t WYSIWYG at all. And as I look back on this now, I realize I was no longer thinking like a writer, about getting text on the page and sculpting that text to be as clear as possible. I was conceptually mixing the act of creation at the keyboard with the act of formatting a document, and they are not the same. But that’s where the WYSIWYG, GUI world had taken me.
It would be another decade before I realized my mistake. But that’s for the next part.
Part 1 of this series is here.
Part 2 of this series is here.
Part 3 of this series is here.
Part 4 of this series is here.