Me and My Computer

Back in the mid-eighties I bought my first computer, an Osborne, one of the first "portables." It was about the size of an overnight suitcase. It had a four inch screen and two 64k floppy drives. It was loaded with WordStar, dBase III, SuperCalc and Space Invaders.

One day I had composed a letter and told the computer to tell the printer (dot matrix) to print it. It did; but, it added a little gift. On the bottom right of the page it printed an *. I went back to the file. There was no asterick on the screen. I printed again. My letter with its asterick printed out.

I did a lot of things, none of which got rid of my new friend. I resorted to reading the manual. No luck.

Finally, I moved the cursor to the right of my name on the screen and hit enter maybe ten times. I printed the letter and it and the asterisk appeared; but, now the little bugger was safely by itself on a second sheet of paper. Mission accomplished.

I have upgraded my computer equipment substantially since then. My current system cost less than a third of what I paid for the Osborne and has what, a million times the capacity?

Yesterday, I was doing some research on-line. I told the computer to tell the printer to print a .pdf file I had found on a website. The computer and/or the printer decided that the old way of fulfilling my wish was boring. They decided to involve a friend of theirs.

A couple of months ago I bought a scanner. A wonderful invention. Mine, a Xerox Documate 510, comes with Paperport software which apparently had been cozying up to Windows and the HP printer software since it had moved in.

The three of them got together and decided that Windows would hand off the print job not to HP as it had been doing for the three and a half years I've had this system. Yesterday morning Windows woke up Paperport. Paperport stretched and "scanned" the .pdf file into its temporary file. There was my .pdf on the screen.

I asked Windows again to print the .pdf file which was still in my browser. Paperport, now awake, quite quickly told me the .pdf was resident in its temporary memory, why should it scan it again? What to do, what to do?

I hit "file" in Paperport. The drop down menu, like most others, had a print option, which I exercised. Pleased, Paperport told Windows to display a print dialogue box, just like it had been doing for the last three and a half years. I hit the print button. HP printed my .pdf.

Not having time to mess with the new division of labor established by my software friends, I continued working. A bit later, I need to print another file from the Web. Same result. Windows woke up Paperport, .....

Last night I got to thinking about the new full employment plan my software had enacted and remembered my problem with the asterisk.

This morning, I enlisted the aid of another piece of software. I called up Windows' Wayback Machine. You may know it as System Restore. I told it to go way back to Sunday.

System Restore then restarted the computer. I told Windows to print a web page. It left Paperport snoozing and got HP on the job, nicely printing the web page.

Somethings don't change.