Stairway to Term Paper Heaven

The green-paneled, glass and steel home of the Office of Information Technology is as incongruous a place as any for the Happy Hacker to begin his search for term-paper heaven. But that's the campus mecca where papers written on computers get printed out in a high-quality, professional-looking style.

Sure, the building at 1730 Cambridge St. looks like something that ate Tokyo, but walk inside, and one is treated to less frightening surroundings. Turn right past the lobby, and ente: OIT's terminal room. It was here that the Hap. v Hacker encountered the Deity, found Nirvana, and found God in the form of an Apple Laserwriter printer.

The laserwriter is fairly simple--for a demigod, that is. It produces near typeset-quality printouts in less time than an image-writer or other dotmatrix printer can turn out draft-quality work. Far superior to daisy wheel printers, the laserwriter is also at least five times faster.

The laserwriter is hooked up to both Macintosh and IBM PCs. You can rent space on these computers for $2.00 per hour, and can sign up for two-hour time slots one day in advance.

Printing papers that are created on your home word processor is fairly simple, provided you plan in advance. Translated, that means finding an appropriate systems disk for a Macintosh or a suitable word processing package on your IBM PC (or compatible).

Do it With a Mac

The laserwriter is designed to work with the Macintosh, and any Macintosh file can be printed out directly. But, taking advantage of the laserwriter's high-quality fonts requires special laser-compatible fonts in your system folder.

It is usually best to write a paper in the laserwriter fonts (even though drafts printed on your imagewriter will look a little funny). However, it's also possible to write a term paper with regular fonts laser-compatible. Simply use one of OIT's Mac system disks (which have the correct fonts), and then load in your Word or Mac Write file. Once in a Mac word processor, it's possible to define a block of text and change the font from the old image-writer font--such as Geneva or New York--into a laser font--such as Times Roman or Helvetica.

PCs Deserve a Place in Heaven

Printing from an IBM compatible file requires some advance preparation. Before going to OIT, a formatted version of the text to be printed must be created. Several of the leading word processors offer this as an option, usually called 'Create a Print File'. Preferable to a regular formatted file is a Postcript file which can be made with Microsoft Word or another Postcript compatible word processor.

A file can then be printed on the laserwriter via the MacBridge program (the MacBridge disk is kept next to OIT's IBM PCs). Once the MacBridge program is run, it will ask for the name and type of the file to be sent to the laserwriter. Type refers to whether the file is Postcript or straight text (ASCII) format.

In addition to the special software, you'll need some spending money to print at OIT. Each page costs 15 cents, but you'll have to buy a vendacard for $10 or $20 through a machine; of course the unused portion can always be refunded.

The guardian angel of the OIT terminal room is the photocopying machine--one of the last at Harvard that works for 5 cents per page. Naturally it works off vendastrips, the same as you would use in the laserwriter.

The support staff only occupies the OIT office from 9 to 4:30 p.m. But heaven/the OIT terminal room is 24 hour accessible with the $1 purchase of a key from OIT's second floor library.

More than one Heaven?

The OIT terminal isn't the only place in town with a laserwriter. Several stores in Harvard Square, including Kinko's, will happily print Mac or IBM compatible disk on a laser printer. The bill, however, will be much stiffer.

There is also a laserwriter hooked up to the Science Center's system. Those feeling technically agile can transfer files from a personal computer onto the Harvard system and from there to the laserwriter. A note of warning: the Happy Hacker does not recommend this to beginners.

Actually after writing all about term-paper heaven, the Hacker better say heaven is more a state of mind than a physical location. True confession: with or without a laserwriter, none of the Happy Hacker's TFs have ever described his papers as heavenly.