Wry wiring
The first draft of the book part of this study was written using Nisus Writer and MSWord, while the hypertext was written using a combination of Storyspace, BBEdit, and other programs. Later drafts of the book were written with MSWord and later drafts of the hypertext used Tinderbox.
A good part of the work was done on a laptop borrowed from my college. I carried the laptop from place to place, writing on my travels. How technologically advanced! But in fact the laptop often crashed, froze, or refused to start. We had to reinstall the operating system five times. It seemed I spent more time searching for software conflicts or bad memory chips than I did writing. Finally, once I was back at the college, the laptop was rebuilt and installed in my office -- that took almost a month. At home there were troubles with my Cube, which were eventually traced to problems in the monitor. Then Mac OS X and Tinderbox came along and made my tasks easier.
We dream of wiring the world, but there is another dimension of embodiment to keep in mind besides human being-in-place. Hard-ware has its own obstinate embodiment.