Work: A newsman´s view of technology: A prize-winning investigative reporter reflects on his past, when he `banged out stories¿ on a manual typewriter, and on how far his profession has come

In 1968, as a 19-yeir-okl reporter in the so-called Silicon Valley area in northern California, I often interviewed such engineers as Robert Noyee, William Hewlett, and Lester Hogan ¿ as well as philosophers and investors I asked them about the rapidly emerging wonders of the electronic age: computer-calculators that would slip into your pocket, men who soon would walk on the moon, and television and telephone networks that would transform our world into a global village. Then I would rush back to a bureau of the San Jose Mercury News to bang out my stories, using the nineteenth-century mechanical technology of the manual typewriter. My work in those days was more akin to that of reporters who are now a full century into the grave than to what reporters do today, just 16 years later.