The only problem is, how am I going to file this story into The Atlantic’s 2017 web based content management system? (Also, the hyphen key isn’t working.) But more on that in a minute.įirst, let me get out of here and switch back to my regular text editor. So here I am, awash in 1980s computing nostalgia, clacking away in an emulated version of the original software, thanks to the Internet Archive. Now here’s a first for me: I’m writing a story for The Atlantic in MacWrite 4.5, the word processing program first released with the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and discontinued a decade later. But I still write first drafts in reporter’s notebooks, and in the Notes section of my iPhone, and on scraps of paper when necessary. Most of the time, I’m typing away in a plain text editor on my laptop. I write everywhere, with whatever technology is at hand. Not just geographically unusual, though there’s that, too. I’m a reporter first, and a writer second, which means I often find myself writing in odd places.
