Evolution at the desk

I was lucky to live and work long. I far left the limit when the average citizen of our country (man) is supposed to die. This duty is not recorded anywhere, but it is observed almost strictly: people do everything that is supposed to, in order not to delay the queue, they drink the laid liters of alcohol, smoke the desired dose of nicotine, get into the planned number of stresses, accidents, risky exercises with weapons, crowded in our clinics, in a word, they do everything to live up to fifty -nine, so that they live up to fifty -nine. And then on average. And I, despite serious illnesses, got out. Born in the third decade of the twentieth century, and now the second decade of the XXI. And I continue to work.

Having chosen a specialty related to writing, I condemn myself to pass the whole series of eras. In fact, in any other lesson, we find some of the very late eras. Take transport. The wheel was invented about five thousand years ago, a little later they harnessed the horse, for more than one and a half years, the planes fly for more than a hundred years. Or take the most rapidly developing industry - military affairs. The gunpowder was already used in the 7th century in China, later it was used by Arabs, and in the XIV century it was secondly opened by the monk Bertold Schwartz. At the end of the XVII century, the cannon nuclei were replaced by explosive shells. Rifled weapons appeared in the middle of the 19th century. In the First World War, tanks and machine guns were already operating, in the second - missile and nuclear weapons.

But the written accessories were replaced much later, so to speak, with a delay. Goose feathers were written until the middle of the 19th century. I did not find this romance anymore. At school, we used steel feathers. Glass inkwells had a standard shape of a jar with a cone, led from above. There was a promoted letter for the recruitment for writing - it was already progress: the elders remembered the sand for drying ink in a notebook. Often, notebooks were produced with a blotter inside. Those who possessed at home a written device on the table remembers heavy press-papier with a semicircular bottom, wrapped in blotting fabric or paper. He was rolled along the sheet.

At the turn of the century, fountain pen appeared (at first they called the “eternal pen”), the first time very imperfect - they released ink at the most inopportune time, planted blots, and fingers stained. They overtook us at the university. They wore them in a jacket’s pocket, despite Akhmatova’s malicious remark about a toothbrush that could be replenished with a “gentleman's set”.

Of course, the dream was to acquire their own writing machine, and the engaging science required two - Russian and Latin. As long as there were no cars, it was necessary to get a familiar driver working with the languages ​​you need - at least English, or even with German and French. I had two permanent engineers: Angelica Periklovna, Russified Greek (worked with two daughters) and Inga Moiseevna, the daughter of the professor, my colleague. Inga Moiseevna even edited a little manuscript.

After graduating from the university, I purchased cars and began to print myself. Five to six copies, a few pages a day-this was performance. Crime was very desirable to carry out to be printed. But it rarely happened. More often I had to stick up inserts, cut some places, rearrange them-re-pacing.

The manuscript acquired an unsightly appearance - this was not accepted in the editorial offices. Reprint. But it was not possible to reprint more than five or six pages a day. The driver, of course, came out much more.

When computers appeared, I immediately grabbed the improving of the spelling - at first I liked this side of the invention. In 1990, I went to Western Berlin to give lectures and brought my first computer from there. In Germany, not IBM, but Atari, and I brought Atari, were popular then. A few years later I bought a laptop, but it was IBM. At first it was difficult to combine them, but then my apartment was robbed, and both were carried away by both. Next, IBM already acquired, more and more advanced models. Then a plasma screen and various auxiliary programs appeared. For a quarter of a century I have been with a computer.

I think that not a single improvement of the writer's craft has changed the performance and possibilities as acquisitions as a computer, and I do not understand at all those old scientists who have not yet mastered this amazing tool (and there are such people around me!). I do not understand those young who use the computer mainly as a game console, stuck at the infant level. In my computer, all games were initially thrown out. They interfere (perhaps I am a boring person, but what is).

Absolutely my performance has increased at least three times. The text appears on the screen with those clots that arise in my mind. I freely rearrange his pieces, make inserts, deletions, corrections, use any signs and languages. In a word, any black sketch gradually turns into a cleanliness. All this with terrible speed, when compared with the recent past.

I own the compilation of tables and drawings worse, it is easier for me to do it at first by hand. I'm not talking about the possibilities of calculations, previously unusually laborious. When I did my dissertation, I had an anthropological part there, implying tens of thousands of calculations on a number of formulas. For months I sat with the Felix calculator and thought, thought, thought. I did the same calculations, working in the 80s on the Anatomy of the Iliad, making statistical tables. And now this can be done in a few days.

But this is only one huge step that the computer allowed me to take. The second step allows him to take his brainchild - the Internet. More and more, he allows me to break away from libraries and reference books, find the necessary books, the necessary quotes, the necessary facts. Serves as a support for memory (weakening with age), an addition to erudition, a source for analysis. More and more new research appears on the Internet. The Internet is more decisive in equipment, wealth and capabilities begins to surpass any library. It just starts, but develops in this direction.

For my colleagues archaeologists, the computer changed the field fixation of the finds-this happened without me (since I have not been traveling on the expedition for a long time).

It seems to me that in the evolution of the writer's component of scientific creativity, the coups were thickened and fit into the life of one generation - mine. In addition, a computer, which appeared almost only, made a revolution in our creative production, which did not produce a single improvement before it. Hyperbole evolution pours into what looks like an explosion.

We cannot get used to it and do not comprehend the whole greatness of what is happening. We are still engaged in small intrigues, live local interests, take care of purely temporary victories, quarrel because of a place in history, but all this is about to depart to the tenth plan. And Crimea, and the Donbass, and the destruction of the Academy of Sciences, and the fall of the ruble, and sanctions, and antisancations. And a cultural explosion will come to the fore, stunning the successes of world science. With us or without us.