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Computer Troubles

Commentary by Dr. Gerhard Falk

        

The Computer War

As the author of 29 books, I consider myself a veteran of the computer war. That war is the result of the unreliability of computers, which cause us authors endless frustration.

Those who write an occasional letter on a computer are already acquainted with the unreliability of that monster. Even a short letter usually includes words which have a missing letter, huge spaces between lines, and communications which disappear without a trace even if the user pushed the save button  repeatedly.

For those of us who write books having 85,000 words, the computer becomes a nightmare. Here are some examples:

1.A finished manuscript, well proofread, is sent to the publisher by email. The publisher responds that all he got is a series of pages not written in English. Instead the New York publisher is confronted with signs, numbers, geometric icons, dots and dashes, but no words. In Buffalo, the manuscript is perfect. Arrived in New York, it is an unreadable mess. 

2.A manuscript is half finished. Suddenly, the fifth chapter is unreadable as the computer moved the second paragraph to the end, the ninth paragraph into second place, the first paragraph into fourth place, etc. All paragraphs are in the wrong place and the whole manuscript is useless.

3.The author is working on chapter nine when he is confronted with the first paragraph of chapter one right in the middle of chapter nine.

4.While I am working on one chapter, I see that the computer inserted the first paragraph of chapter one into chapter seven.

5.The entire manuscript suddenly disappears.

There are many more examples of the unreliability of the computer. Yet, so called experts claim that the user of the computer is at fault because he should learn how to deal with all these difficulties. That adds insult to injury.

The customer of the computer industry pays a lot of money to use the computer. It is therefore the duty of the manufacturer of the software, Micrisoft, ad the hardware , Hewlett-Packard in this case, to construct a reliable computer rather than take advantage of their monopolies and sell the most unreliable instrument in the technological world to the “suckers” who buy it.

Shalom u'vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Gender, Sex, & Status (2019).

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