IN THE STYLE OF THE TIME

IN THE STYLE OF THE TIME

TDC

Motorcycles evolve—and so does the technology we use to report on them.

KEVIN CAMERON

When I had finished writing my first contribution for the old Cycle magazine in late 1972, I mailed it to Editor Cook Neilson. Actually I mailed two separate copies as a sort of crude insurance—it was Christmas season. I typed them on one of three Smith Corona typewriters that I would wear out over the years, and I made copies using carbon paper. Once I seemed to be more or less accepted as a contributor, I was asked to speed up the process by FedExing my stories. A big step forward was reporting on the 1980 Daytona 200. The Esquire Beach hotel had long corridors through which celebrants in leather vests rode their Harleys. I stayed over two days to clack through all the typing and reject copy, then searched out the FedEx office behind the Jacksonville airport on my 1,200-mile drive home.

Part of that scene was the many rented box trucks filled with bikes, arriving from distant (and often below-freezing) parts of the nation. When within comfortable riding distance of Daytona they’d pull into a lay-by, unload their bikes, and prepare to make their grand entrances. Who got the short straw and had to drive the truck?

Goodbye Smith Corona; Hello Atari

From 1986 on I was able to set aside those typewriters and quires of paper for on-screen editing made possible by a new Atari computer (find them in museums today) with a Graphical User Interface. Computer professionals, I soon learned, existed far above GUIs. GUIs gobbled processing power, and professionals supplemented the weak processors of the time by memorizing more than 200 DOS commands. Good one—Moore’s law soon had the world awash in processing power, and now it was the Command Line Interface people gathering dust in the computing museums.

The Atari changed my way of working. Formerly, I walked around the house, freshly typed copy in one hand, coffee in the other, reading aloud. Reading aloud reveals clumsy word choice, the insulting tone of lecturing, or efforts to hide from the reader by not being direct.

But now, once everything was in place after the final read-through, I was ready for the next step, which was to print the final draft on a dotmatrix machine, or “needle printer.” No more whacking out two or three edits (literally cut and pasted together), and then a clean copy to send off.

Enter the Modem

I began to hear of “home computer” owners using devices called “modems,” by which one computer could communicate with another over a phone line. At first this seemed pointless—the information this made accessible was largely useless.

But it was potentially faster than hard copy sent overnight, positively arriving by 10 o’clock tomorrow morning. I would master this new art not long before a corporate hatchet man arrived to take Cycle’s California office staff to dinner, tell them about his houses in Maine and Florida, complain about the inconvenience of the ashtray in his Ferrari Superamerica, and fire them all. The Mothership resorbed Cycle, and I was asked to join Cycle World. Survivor’s guilt made a strange bedfellow to the comfort of employment continuity. Welcome to corporate life.

Speaking with a drag race friend who had an aerospace job, I expressed curiosity about aluminum alloy Z5D, which Yamaha was using to make its welded aluminum roadrace chassis starting in 1980.

“No problem,” I was told. “I’ll just pop onto our military info network and have that for you.”

Two days later he brought me a Z5D printout. (It was an age-hardening alloy originally developed for aluminum railcars.)

Learning to Say Tetrahydromethylcyclopentadiene

Next I asked about the cruise-missile fuel TH-dimer, which I suspected was related to the high energy Formula 1 fuels appearing in the 1990s. This time my friend came back wounded. “They told me don’t ask stuff like that—it’s like you’re asking for the pulse repetition frequencies of US airdefense radars.” (Not so many years later somebody big decided everyone knew all that chemistry anyway so it was declassified and I learned to say tetrahydromethylcyclopentadiene.) I’d known MIT academics who used such limited-access networks—but mostly to play Spacewar with counterparts at Stanford. What next?

Modems evolved—over time I accumulated a collection of them from smaller to larger, alleged to have been either improvements (getting any connection remained an edgy thrill) or responses to faster communications standards.

Now came the problem of establishing this connection with Cycle World. No, CW Editor-in-Chief David Edwards would not wait until tomorrow. We need this, and we need it now.

Their IT guy and I kept two phone lines between East and West coasts warm for three hours as we tried A, then tried B, deep into the alphabet. It was only when we had repeated some clunky procedures several times that accidental success occurred. Data flowing!

It was March of 1994 when I realized that cellphones were breaking down all doors—frantic Harley techs and Mr. Bigs crowded into their garage at Daytona, where their all-new VR1000 Superbike was teething. Any passerby could hear snatches of their tensionfilled exchanges with suppliers—electric fuel pumps not pumping, balancer phasing gears dephasing, and clutches turning black. Everyone in that garage had a cellphone to his head. Yet for a long time they remained curiosities—I’d see folk striding straight from overseas airport arrival gates to brightly lit phone stores to buy the particular instrument that would work at their destination.

Creeping Coax

The internet slithered up our rural road in black coax, a commercial growth of the originally military/academic system. Once connected, all participants are neighbors, all information potentially shared (magic decoder ring optional).

In 2003, eating sushi in a little Tokyo hole-in-the-wall, I saw the proprietor raise his phone and start taking pictures. Oh yes, the new basis of life, maybe even its purpose. The phone is always in one hand. This is why so many people drop their phones into toilets. A fast computer, a graphics-sized memory, broadband, and a battery.

Digital communication smoothed out, even became routine. No more hotel-room anxiety over getting six new-model stories to California from Munich or Milan at one in the morning. Email never sleeps.

COVID pumped digital into daily life. Order everything online. Public school is a laptop at home. Give the airlines a sabbatical—conference by Zoom. Working from home lets your employer unload the building to developers.

Now those cracking concrete support columns are their problem. Your spare room is a tax-abating business expense.

In this transformation everything familiar is given a marketing name. I was a writer but now I am a content provider. Content production systems can allow editors 3,000 miles away to examine my words as I type, on their screens. People expect spellcheck and grammar check to transform any word string into Shakespeare, with comic results. (Even the Gray Lady —The New York Times—now accepts these errors.) More recent systems actively countercompose my sentences as I type, generating colloquial nonsense. Don’t you really mean to say...? Weather and financial reports now come into being without human agency, so what next? No matter what your profession, prepare to be replaced as soon as the software is ready.

Think I’ll go up to the shop and do a couple of hours on my 1965 Yamaha TD1-B.