My Road to Writing, Part 3: Getting Graphical

Published: Jun 8, 2021 by Richard Sezov

I grew up in Wildwood, NJ, a tourist town complete with all the trappings: a beautiful beach with white, powdery sand, restaurants, a boardwalk with rides, water parks, arcades, and games. As such, it was never all that hard for a local like me to find a summer job. By the end of my junior year of college, I’d been working summer jobs for 8 years; most recently as the driver of the Chilly Willy Ice Cream truck. By then, I finally saved up enough “extra” money to buy a new computer—this time, one that was top-of-the-line.

I paid about $1500 for a 486 DX-33. It had 4MB of RAM, a whopping 120MB hard drive, a sound card, and an accelerated graphics card paired with a 14-inch color monitor. It came in a gigantic tower case that was about 3 feet (1 meter) high. I could have gotten Microsoft Windows 3.0 with it, but no, that was too pedestrian for my 32-bit microprocessor. I opted to purchase IBM’s 32-bit OS/2 operating system which was, after all, advertised as a better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows.

I kept using my beloved WordStar, which I’d upgraded to the latest release (version 7). It ran perfectly on OS/2. The experience, however, was strange for me. When I booted my machine, I had an environment more similar to the Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga than the text-only DOS environment I’d been used to with my old machine. WordStar ran in a text-mode DOS window, or I could simulate DOS by going to a full-screen DOS session. Though I’d entered the world of graphical, pre-emptive multi-tasking, I still operated my computer by doing one thing at a time, as though it were still an old, obsolete machine.

I wasn’t aware of this then, but looking back on it now I can see that my identity had shifted. No longer was my computer a utilitarian thing, a tool mainly used for creating words. Now I used my computer for many, many things, and I wanted to use it correctly. I avidly read PC Magazine and learned all about ISA, EISA, and VESA Local Bus slots, IRQ settings, and more. I learned about co-operative and pre-emptive multi-tasking and new, graphical applications that could replace the old text-only, DOS-based ones. At school, now that I’d dropped the secondary education requirements, I had free slots in my schedule that I filled with computer programming classes. My girlfriend (now wife) bought me Turbo Pascal for Christmas—another program I ran in an OS/2 DOS window, but which I needed for my computer classes.

I had no connection to the Linux world (in its infancy; this was 1992 after all) or its Unix heritage, where text was (and still mostly is) king. All I saw were articles championing graphical desktop environments, the superiority of graphical applications, and how multi-tasking would change the world.

My roommate had a Commodore Amiga, a machine that had been both graphical and multi-tasking since 1985, before I’d even gotten my first PC. To him, my PC—even though it ran my fancy, graphical OS/2 operating system—was a primitive thing, still catching up to what the Amiga had been able to do for years. He typed his papers into a graphical word processor (I’m sorry, Amiga fans: I don’t know which one it was) that looked to me similar to a page layout program. When he printed those papers, they used scalable fonts and looked exactly the way they had on his screen. My WordStar had a preview function that showed you what your document would look like—and I’d extended it with some scalable font add-on that I don’t remember now—but you still had to type the document in plain old text mode.

I’m pretty sure the magazines and my roommate’s computer started me down the road of graphics envy. It wasn’t their fault, of course; and part of it was my desire to learn more about computers in general, and to do things right. After all, I was now about to graduate in the spring; I needed a job in the computer industry and to get that, I needed to know what I was doing. If I had an adviser in the Computer Science department I’d have been set straight, but I was still an English major taking extra computer classes.

I can’t understate the incessant over-and-over repetition of how important graphical interfaces were in every computer magazine of the time. DOS and its text-only interface was passé; a way of working for Neanderthals who could not see the utility and beauty of running two programs at the same time, seeing documents or pictures on the screen exactly the way they’d be printed, or copying files by dragging them where they needed to go and dropping them there. In hindsight, I think this was the PC world’s own brand of envy: the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST had had all of these things for years. The PC had to evolve.

I began to believe that going full-on Graphical User Interface was the way to go. With the PC, I had to evolve. At the time, there were several GUIs for the PC. The leading GUI was Microsoft Windows, but Windows wasn’t yet an operating system; instead, it ran on top of DOS and gave you a graphical interface. It could only do cooperative multitasking, which meant that leaving CPU cycles for multiple programs to run was the responsibility of the programs themselves, not the operating system. Programs could take over the whole CPU (and they did) and they could overwrite memory already allocated for another program, which would cause a crash. By contrast, OS/2 was far superior in every way as a fully pre-emptive multitasking operating system with memory protection, complete with a GUI. It seemed like the future.

I went all in.

Though I was happy and efficient on WordStar, the first graphical program I bought was a word processor, of course. Though I now had an interest in programming, I remained an English major, and writing was still the primary unit of “work” created on my computer. DeScribe led the small group of OS/2-based word processors; I bought a copy.

DeScribe was actually wonderful. In addition to making me feel like one of the cool guys who did computing right with a graphical interface, it actually provided two resources in one. Prior to this, I had a cheap desktop publishing program to do flyers and newsletters and stuff. I’d import text from WordStar to create those documents. Now DeScribe could do all of that in one program. It really was a sea change or paradigm shift.

In my final year of college, I used OS/2 to play tons of DOS-based video games, program in Turbo Pascal, and create documents in DeScribe. By February of 1993 I’d have my first full-time job as a computer technician, by May I’d graduate, by August I’d be married, and by September I’d own my first house, a 500 sq. ft. bungalow. Writing—particularly writing fiction—had become a back-burner thing in my mind, a dream perhaps for the far future. Right now I had a career to build, a marriage to maintain, new responsibilities as a homeowner, and lots to learn in all these areas. Spare time was spent on my computer, but not writing. I was learning about networking with Novell Netware, this new thing called the Internet, and how to fix computers. I had no time to write.

As perhaps happens to many people, my childhood dream succumbed to bigger, more immediate concerns. But it never died.