It was Monday night. My deadline was Wednesday. If I finished by 5:00 PM Tuesday, the publisher would have the manuscript at the deadline.
\n
\nI forget which book it was, probably something on Batch File Programming. Even though I was finished writing, I still had to print the book. Yes, back in the late 1980s, computer books were printed and sent to the publisher.<\/p>\n
To be safe, and just in case the printer went nuts, I decided to start printing Monday evening. That way I’d be done well before the 4:30 PM UPS deadline for overnight packages. The reason for the long timespan is that printing back in those days wasn’t as certain as it is today. That meant an all-nighter was in order.<\/p>\n
Preparation included obtaining sufficient quantity pizza, chips, donuts, and Jolt Cola. I bought a box of tractor-feed paper and spare ribbons for my trusty NEC PC-8023a-C dot matrix printer.<\/p>\n
My job: To print chapters one after the other — print spooling and multitasking didn’t exist back then. And the printer was slow. The 400 or so pages I needed to print would take, by my calculations, about 13 hours. That was assuming no jams or glitches.<\/p>\n
I spent all night printing. Many high-calorie snacks were consumed, but after a while I was so buzzed that I didn’t need to eat any more.<\/p>\n
The process went smoothly; there were few glitches and jams. I did need to change the ribbon and occasionally the paper broke or required me to re-fold it. The printer’s noise made watching TV difficult, and fortunately none of my neighbors complained.<\/p>\n
At about 7:00 AM I finished. The stack of paper was about 10 inches high. I put it in a box, along with some disks (program listing and courtesy copies of the text), and drove over to UPS to send it off overnight. The deadline being met, I went home and tried to get some sleep.<\/p>\n
Sleep would not come. So many calories and so much caffeine made it impossible. I remember my heart throbbing irregularly in my chest. “Uh-oh, this is bad,” I thought, but I survived. I finally passed out later that evening.<\/p>\n
Fast forward a week and I was fully recovered, but eager to hear praises from my publisher for meeting my deadline. Apparently it was a rare event.<\/p>\n
Indeed, my publisher was pleased that the book came in on time. He said, “I have it right here on my desk. I’ll probably be opening it tomorrow or the next day when I get a chance.”<\/p>\n
I was crestfallen. All that work. The overnighter. The donuts and caffeine. The expensive of sending a heavy package overnight. And the publisher didn’t even open the box for two weeks!<\/p>\n
That was probably the last all-nighter I pulled as a writer. Better timing and technology has pretty much made the “before deadline all nighter” a thing of the past. But I still remember sitting in my wee little apartment, printing out 400 pages of a book just to make a deadline — a deadline that apparently didn’t matter anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was Monday night. My deadline was Wednesday. If I finished by 5:00 PM Tuesday, the publisher would have the manuscript at the deadline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4251"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4274,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4251\/revisions\/4274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}