Remember the All-Nighter?

A long, long time ago I stayed up all and night played with a computer. It was a Macintosh SE and I was learning Aldus PageMaker. If you're not familiar with the awesome SE it had a screen slightly larger than today's iPad. Aldus PageMaker was the forerunner in desktop publishing. So, imagine trying to design an 11 x 17 newsletter on a screen the size of an iPad and you can probably feel the frustration: click-and-scroll, click-and-scroll, feel the insanity setting in.

But guess what? I didn't mind at all. In fact, I loved the experience! Before I sat down to learn this computer-thingy I had to get these long strips of "copy" from a typesetter, cut them into shorter strips to fit onto the backer board, use a glue stick to "cut-and-paste" all the columns into a newsletter-format, and tons more work. Not with this awesome little machine: just click-and-scroll, zoom in-and-out, hit print occasionally, and I could do the whole job myself. And once I learned PageMaker, I mean really, really got it down cold, I could layout an entire print job in just an hour or two.

Work was fun - and it was hardly work at all. It was an achievement, an accomplishment, to see what took a week before being done in just hours with this technology.

Today? Big deal. We all have monitors bigger than the TV in my first apartment. The iPhone is probably more powerful than that old Apple SE. And the concept of cutting-and-pasting column inches is long, long ago. Our technology is incredible, but is anyone staying up all night still "playing" with their work? Maybe, but it's not as many and probably not as often.

So what's changed? Has technology caught up to our excitement, or has our excitement over technology waned? Was the excitement there because of the opportunities technology presented, or were our 1989 minds simply blown away by the magic of the computer?