Harumph: Rick Bruner calls me

Harumph
: Rick Bruner calls me “the old man of new media.”

Remember this: The beard is prematurely gray. Very prematurely. Damnit.

But I’ll forgive him because he takes kindly to vlogs (scroll down till you see a prematurely gray beard on TV).

: OK, maybe I am the old man of new media for I remember Linotypes, the wonderful, filthy, kerchunketa-kerchunketa machines that used to set type back when type was type and rewritemen were rewritemen. I was there when we switched to cold type and then to computers (that’s how I got into this whole technology thing in the first place).

Anyway, I loved the old machines. And now here is a site dedicated to Linotype memories. [via ein Blog]

: And here’s more proof that I am the old man of new media. Damn.

I just recalled wowing a consultant type recently recalling that I was there the day WYSIWYG was invented. I was at a conference of publishing technotypes in California for Time Inc. way back when it was still Time Inc. and John Seybold (the patriarch of all the other Seybolds) stood up and noted a trend in publishing systems back then, an entirely new idea, the thought that you could change something on a screen and end up with exactly that on paper. He said he heard a lot of people talking about “what you see is what you get” and he abbreviated it then and there. You may not be impressed. But some are.