Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Text editing and formatting

As a teacher at Grinnell, I got enough disk space to begin storing ordinary handouts and exercises electronically. I created them, at first, using a screen-oriented text editor called EDT, supplied by the Digital Equipment Corporation as part of the system software for the main academic computer, and I printed them on a very modern printer also made by Digital, the LN03. Here is a page from the first handout in one of the first courses I taught here.

This handout is also the earliest document that I stored electronically and still have access to. I saved a paper copy of it, which is what you see on the slide, but I also saved it as a computer file, which looks like this. You'll notice that this version is not quite identical with the printed one -- it has no left, top, or bottom margin and is not divided into pages. The computer file is actually the original. To produce the printed output, I used another piece of software, a rudimentary text formatter, to add margins and page headers.

By separating the stored file from the printed output in this way, I made the continued reproducibility of the printed document dependent on another piece of software. I wrote the text formatter myself, so there was no great harm in this. On the other hand, although I kept the document's source file, I didn't keep the formatter, or at any rate I can't seem to find it. In this case, I haven't lost much, because I could rewrite the formatter from scratch in about half an hour. (In preparation for this talk in 2001, I did rewrite the formatter from scratch, and it actually took almost exactly half an hour.)

However, I soon started to experiment with other, more powerful text formatters, beginning with RUNOFF, another piece of Digital system software. RUNOFF was much fancier, and would do things like center lines, fill text automatically to the width of the page body, underline for emphasis, and so on. To achieve these effects, however, you had to ``mark up'' your original document with RUNOFF commands, which the software would strip out and interpret. This greatly increased the difference between the original, as stored in a computer file, and the printed document. It also increased one's reliance on the software.

Although EDT and RUNOFF are still apparently clinging to existence as components of Hewlett-Packard's OpenVMS operating system, they are not free software, and I don't think that we have them available on campus any more. I haven't kept any documents containing RUNOFF commands; if I had, I would no longer be able to turn them into printed output.