{"id":635,"date":"2003-05-26T09:56:14","date_gmt":"2003-05-26T13:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=635"},"modified":"2003-05-26T09:56:14","modified_gmt":"2003-05-26T13:56:14","slug":"apologies-for-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=635","title":{"rendered":"apologies for absence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first computer I ever used had a daisy wheel printer so noisy that I would move to the floor below when it was time to print out a draft of the pamphlet I was writing (for an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cps.org.uk\">improbable thinktank<\/a> ). So start it up, you pressed <strong>B<\/strong> and then <return>. The <strong>B<\/strong> stood, of course, for &#8220;boot&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n<p>The most astonishing thing about it, though, was the wonderful machine  owned by the typesetters. &#8220;It&#8217;s like a great big hoover&#8221;, explained Ollie Knox, who ran the place. &#8220;You plug it in, and it sucks everything you have written away into the box, when it gets to the typesetters they can empty it out with all the markup.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>This was in 1984. He was describing an external  floppy disk drive.<\/p>\n\n<p>Anyway, someone seems to have plugged one of those into me in the last fornight, and it sucked out every particle of joy and hope, even from hard-to-reach corners. So I&#8217;ve been fully occupied trying to write two profiles at once, without the spirit to find time to keep this up. Hope things will be better from now on.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first computer I ever used had a daisy wheel printer so noisy that I would move to the floor below when it was time to print out a draft of the pamphlet I was writing (for an improbable thinktank &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=635\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=635\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}