A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was back in the early days of the technological revolution in newsrooms when one intrepid sports reporter found that the keyboard of his computer worked no more.

No matter how hard he thumped them, the keys simply wouldn’t depress, and the little green cursor remained pulsing but stationary on his screen.

This was back in the eighties – many years before the smoking ban – and the man, in fairness, had plied his trade for years in a very different environment…sweaty, smoky rooms characterised by the clang of typewriter carriages being catapulted with force from left to right as you moved onto another line.

Now he was adjusting to a world of virtual silence, punctuated by little more than the odd cry of exasperation as the dammed machines didn’t do what you wanted them to – or the story vanished before your very eyes because someone tripped over the cable and cut the power.

Computerisation was in its infancy and the first step forward often seemed to really amount to two steps in the other direction – because for all of the novelty, you never lost a story from a typewriter, even if the end result was a series of shredded paragraphs held together with little more than hope and glue.

The early computers were really just electronic typewriters with screens; search engines were a dream away and apps weren’t even thought of in Science Fiction movies.

But this was the era of new technology and there was no turning back – even when you could no longer work the keyboard.

So, in order to get back to his opus, our sports hack – long since gone to his eternal reward – sought the urgent assistance of the in-house computer whizzkid who duly arrived with the tools of his trade.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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