a mARTIAN dIARY

The origins of usage of computer for typesetting of documents can be traced to the legacy of the veteran iron war horses known as typewriters. While computers were being developed for number crunching scientific (and military) applications, cranks with an eye for money minting realized the potential of this semiconductor baby to revolutionize the publishing industry. Thus was born the first word processing software and its connected professionals, born-again typists. The potential of this young prodigy was only superseded by its ruthlessness in outperforming and thus eliminating its competitors, which can be testified by the relic status given to typewriters now. Except for the aged writer, who is too stubborn or superstitious change his trusted tool, we will be hard pressed to find a typewriter anywhere else. But just as in the melancholy of defeat comes new learning; in the heavy march of victory valuable lessons are trampled without witnesses The tremendous success of word processing software over its predecessor lead to a ‘no prisoners’ strategy, where in most of the focus related to word processors was into excelling its predecessor. That is focus was totally on creating the ultimate tool that could handle the whole processor or word-processing ‘for printing’ child’s play. The italicized words convey the focus! So even when computers started becoming so common and cheap that, it was easier to read these documents from the system rather than a print out, the old tools were reused. So much to prove the laziness of man! There was motion in some direction leading to development of PDF and eBook formats. But still they lingered around the age old principles, too afraid to go for a radical change. It is needless to emphasize that a hardcopy of any document has its own advantage, at the countless ways it can be physically positioned, the psychological inertia coming from reading of books during the academic years and easy navigation up and down at the twist of a paper. But along with those lie its various disadvantages too. It presents information is a mundane non interactive way. The linking between the different concepts is usually inferred by language constructs or formatting. The occasional picture in the document does help reduce this disadvantage to a level, but a part remains. On the contrary, reading from the system monitor offers no flexibility as far physical positioning is concerned, except for some new age paper-like display devices but they can be a case or taking the river to the horse rather than vice versa. Also it does not offer (at lease current reader GUIs) much flexibility in terms of navigation that a book affords except for the search feature perhaps. And where paper is weak, the system gains a strong hand, its excellent environment for linked interactive interface for data from a book. It can present info the exact way it’s mapped in our brain. This brings us to the concept of concept mapping and related software. Watch this space