🚀 go-pugleaf

Paul Bodin disputed being a founder of the Nota Bene discussion
list and wrote :

<snip>

> I started using NB at version 2, and the SLS as soon as it came out, I
> didn't know of the mailing list until I started my program at Union
> Seminary in 1990.  I was introduced to the list by Robin Cover via
> Debora Reumann and Steve Siebert.
>
> At that time the list was already well populated with such luminaries
> at Itamar Even-Zohar (who was, I think, a co-founder with David
> Sitman), Dorothy Day, Mervyn Bennun, J-P Takala and a great many
> others.

Thanks for the title, but I wasn't on the list then. I'm quite sure Paul
himself was among the established gurus of the list when I joined (and,
in addition to the names he listed, Tony Woozley was very much present).
I only learned about the list after Dragonfly's _Wings_ carried a note
about it. Late 1991 or early 1992.

I got Nota Bene in late 1988, version 3, pre-Ibid it was. I noticed an
ad of NB somewhere, maybe The Times Literary Supplement or something. I
also learned that some colleagues of mine in Berkeley used it (they have
relinquished it since) and spoke with them about it.

The first word processor I used was part of a Finnish multipurpose
package called Survo. This was Fall 1983 and Spring 1984, on a 64 kb
Wang with two 8" floppy drives. Their capacity was so little that when I
wanted to move a paragraph around I had to put in Program Disk B (or
something) since Program Disk A did not have enough space for that
procedure. Several other people used the same computer, so we had turns
and queues.

Fall 1984 I got a Kaypro II and WordStar (yes, like many others, I've
configured a number of my NB keys along WS's specifications), soon
another CP/M Kaypro with a 10M hard drive. Then, probably late 1986, I
got my first DOS computer and started using WordPerfect. It could do a
number of things that the CP/M WS could not and that I had written Basic
and Turbo Pascal programs to help with. I wasn't very happy with WP it
though. One longer paper I wrote using FrameWork--the main attraction
was its outlining capacity (I'm looking forward to the promised
outlining capacity in NBWindows -- its lack so far is one of my main
complaints about NB).

The computers have brought a lot of new and amazing thing for writing
and research. I'm still inclined to think that, in wordprocessing, the
biggest single step was the one from the typewriter to the most
primitive computer: no need to retype perfectly good text just because
something next to it contained a typo or loose thought. (There are two
other major things: email and www.)

j-p takala
Jukka-Pekka.Takala@Helsinki.Fi