The Mirror of Alteration

Buying WordStar for DOS [. . . .]
If you want to purchase a copy of WS7.0d (the last and best of the DOS versions), you are now officially out of luck. The Learning Company (now owned by Mattel) simply couldn't care less about your needs. Check software flea markets, auctions (e-Bay, etc.) and the like [. . . .] Sorry. We wish it were otherwise. (URL is no longer accessible)

I bought my first IBM computer in 1981. I trundled it home, set it in place, and booted it up. The machine hummed, but the screen was black except for an enigmatic A:> prompt. Knowing little about DOS at the time, I had no idea how to get Wordstar to work. I knew to put the floppy disk in the drive slot, but I could not guess how to issue a command to make something happen. Finally, a colleague showed me how to type in A:>B:ws.exe.

DOS was a "user-friendly" operating system that allowed one to interact with the machine language "underneath." Since that time, DOS has morphed into MS DOS and now has disappeared from the screen world that I normally access. It has been buried in succession by Windows, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000. In the meantime, the Windows operating system has been steadily subsumed beneath the browser software. Mosaic and Netscape 1 were initially stand-alone functions that one opened separately when one wanted to access the new WWW. More recently, users have been encouraged to use the browser feature as their top-level access. Far from having to figure out what to type into a prompt line, we are now greeted with screens that display a myriad of options in graphic color.

I trace this evolution not to illustrate the multi-layered code beneath our notice but to foreground the hypermedia writer's dependence on the platform. While electronic writers, artists, and critics often speak of this work as being created on a computing machine, the reality is somewhat different. First, we are always making a piece of work that is inscribed on the top layer of strata of interpretive systems: machine, operating, and authoring. And, second, we must display our work through this same mediated, electronic device.

Creation of the work itself depends on a sequence of codes. For an electronic writer the relationship between the material and the writer is not a simple equation of Creator plus Material equals Creation. Rather, the formula is Creator working through a machine with machine language running an operating system that enables program software which produces products that can be assembled with an authoring device to package and distribute the Material as a Creation.

Despite the interdependency of electronic writing and its platform, the continual alteration of the creative environment has been a ubiquitous feature of hypermedia and art. The instability arises out of that long string of connections between the machine and the creator. A change in any one of the elements affects other elements along the chain. A hypermedia writer may have carefully constructed an environmental hierarchy series - Dell Computer Box| Dell insides|MS DOS|Windows3.1|Microsoft Works/Tools:Hotmetal/Photoshop2/Midi-edit|Netscape2||me 5 years ago - only to find that the move to Windows 95 occasions a change in all software further along the chain. The HTML compilers, for example, that worked for Windows 3.1 are not suitable for Windows 2000. In general, software tends to work in "generations" - the photo manipulating software that was developed contemporaneously with Win 3.1 is useless in Win 95 or 98.

As I write this, I look back with nostalgia for the lazy days when a software "generation" was a couple of years. The rate of change continues to accelerate. A software generation may be only six months now, or shorter. Netscape 4.7 was cutting edge in November 1999; Netscape 6 arrived in November 2000 (skipping a Netscape 5 entirely). Netscape 6.1 was available in beta by February 2001, and available to the general public by August 2001. Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 in 1999 was followed by Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, and, most recently, version 6 in beta, in July 2001. Each of these browsers has a slightly different way of interpreting the HTML code and may require the writer or artist to create several browser-specific versions.

The creative environment - the tools and material - continually threatens to render a piece obsolete before it fully materializes. Furthermore, the means to display the completed work, at least on the WWW, has been even more unreliable. Incompatible browser software can also lead us back to the black screen with a blinking cursor.

Recto / Permanence / Impermanence / Alteration / Obsolescence / Obliteration / Verso