Part 7
Looking back to the days before laptops and the Internet, I recall my earliest attempts at writing were in1956, on a notepad that I had taken with me on a canoeing adventure from Paris to Lyon in France, a distance of some 400 kilometers.
My buddy from Namibia, Alan Louw, and myself each had a kayak. Initially we planned to paddle right across Europe along the numerous rivers and canals, but after two weeks of watching cyclists racing past us on the towpath, we sadly came to the conclusion that there were faster ways to travel.
Nevertheless, we had many small adventures, starting with the first lock we encountered on the river Seine outside Paris. The lock-keeper demanded our permits to pass through the lock. We’d never heard of such a thing. There are 183 locks between Paris and Lyon and we had to portage our canoes on foot past every one. Even worse was a hill in the Loire Valley where the Canal Lateral de le Loire, on which we were paddling, had a series of ten locks, five up and five down, to traverse this hill. Ten miles or so of carrying our canoes and far too many personal belongings taught us a severe lesson about advance planning.
All of which was recorded in my notebook, with a nib pen. Sigh … oh, for an iPod or even a mobile phone!
I continued to write by hand even after I had learned to type with two fingers. All my earlier film and television scriptwriting was handed over to a typist to type for me – an incredible waste of time and money. Frankly, it was only because of a lean patch in finding work that I realized that a typist was a luxury I could do without. Gritting my teeth, I invested in an old and decrepit desktop computer and went through all the agonies of teaching myself how to operate a computer. Anyone who has learned about a computer this way will know what I’m saying, as I lost umpteen documents in the “simple” process of learning how to type them and then save them.
It’s a humbling process when you know yourself to be reasonably intelligent but this weird machine reduces you to a gibbering wreck. Then you go in search of a friend who is computer literate. You explain your problem. They laugh at you patronizingly and say, “Of course, it’s really simple. You just do this … and this … and this.” They lost you on the first “this” and even when you query it and say, “Forgive me I’m very slow. Please give me that again,” they go from 100 to 50 miles an hour and you still get lost in their wake.
ExoBrain offers the promise of making computing simple from step one for even the most computer-illiterate person.
To repeat, it thinks along the same lines that a human thinks. It doesn’t terrorize you into learning the current system’s computer-speak before you can operate a machine that offers so much and delivers so little.
I don’t know about you, but this seems pretty advantageous to me.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.