20 years ago

[cellio]

This weekend I got a phone call from the Tartan, the CMU student newspaper. When I was a student I was news editor and then editor in chief. During that time, among many other things, I wrote some of the earliest articles about CMU's budding plans to team up with IBM to put a computer in every room and on every desk. It was 1982; this was

Comments

[cellio]

I just got email with a pointer to the article.

[eub]

I read that article in the paper Tartan! It quoted you extensively.

I didn't know you were the News Editor for the Tartan. I bet you enforced a substantially higher bar for literacy than they do now. :-}

[cellio]

Literacy: I strove for high standards, but I haven't seen the current ones so I can't compare.

My first job at the Tartan was actually as a proofreader. Yes, they hired actual proofreaders in 1980; it was my first work-study job. Unfortunately, during the second semester the university cut their budget for such things and they got rid of all the proofreaders, saying that the typesetters could do it as they entered stories. (Yeah, typesetting machines.) Now I bet too many authors are relying on automated spell-check and forgetting that there's more to proofreading than spelling, so it really falls to the editors to catch such problems.

[eub]

And quis editiet? I love this sentence (it's the whole paragraph, actually) from the 11/12/2001 issue of the Tartan:

It is worth noting that not since Doherty altered the methods of technical teaching have administrators encroached upon the President's ability to drastically reformulate the direction of a young institution of higher learning so quickly with the exception of Cyert.

The story was written by Brad Grantz, Editor-in-Chief.

[cellio]

Gesundheit! (No, I can't spell correctly in German; why do you ask?)

Wow, that's, um, special.

[dr4b]

yeah, I was going to say, incase nobody told you yet -- you are quoted on the front page of the paper version of the Tartan this week.
cool, huh?

[cellio]

Front page? Interesting. Any chance you could pick up a copy of the paper edition for me?