The Shortest Path from Thoughts to Words (Premium)

Some transitions happen instantly, but others require time. And in my case, switching writing tools took a long, long time.

So let's go back in time.
? Oh, the Amiga, I miss you so
As an Amiga user in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was painfully aware of the growing divide between the personal computing platform I loved so dearly and the real world that was dominated by the inferior MS-DOS and then Windows. This divide reared its ugly head in different ways, but the quality and diversity of productivity applications was key among them. Where the Amiga was viewed mostly as a great gaming system, the IBM PC and its clones were more focused on productivity.

There were exceptions. The Amiga experienced a brief moment in the sun thanks to what we now call the creator market with graphics apps like DeluxePaint and Photon Paint and, of course, video solutions like the Video Toaster. And an even briefer moment, like a stolen kiss, with the mainstream when WordPerfect arrived on the Amiga in 1987 ... and then quietly disappeared within a few short years.

I wasn't a writer at this time, and it's not coincidental that my shift from whatever I was then to what I became--a software developer and then a writer--happened as I shifted from the Amiga to the PC. Or, maybe it is coincidental. By that time, Commodore, the maker of the Amiga, had filed for bankruptcy, and the future of the platform, always in doubt, was even more questionable.

But even in my pre-career days, I understood the importance of writing, and the personal computing era brought with it a sense of permanence, where the content I created, be it words or pictures, might carry forward with me and not be ephemeral. This was a big deal to me. As a child and teenager, I was an artist, but I also created comic books that ranged from the serious--adaptations of Star Wars inspired by how bad the official Marvel adaptations were--to the more comical. I also wrote stories, using just words. Most of what I created was on paper and couldn't be duplicated, not in any meaningful way.

The writing tools I was exposed to--and could afford--were primitive, and they remained that way for a long time. In this era, electronic tools existed for two reasons: You could save your work and return to it later. And you could print it out. The end game at this time was always paper.

My first word processing application was likely PaperClip on my Commodore 64 in the early 1980s, that's a bit fuzzy, but then the powerful MacWrite-influenced GeoWrite that strained the capabilities of that system; in both cases, the output was to an Okimate 20 color printer. When I lost my C64C in a house fire, I moved on, briefly, to an Apple IIGS and its AppleWorks GS app, and I would print the results to the Apple ImageWriter II printer I had gotten with that computer at great expense.

The II GS was a financial disaster, so I moved from that to a used Amiga 500 computer. I couldn't afford...