There’s a – yes – letter on one of my Mac’s screens – a project I’ve been pecking away at for most of the afternoon. It’s a message to the head of my old school in Hudson, Ohio.

A letter, I should explain, is a printed document that is also sometimes written out – a process of putting pigments on a thin sheet of fiber called paper with a manual instrument, sort of like putting paint on a wall with a brush.

Said letters are packaged, mainly for in-transit security purposes, then shipped, for a fee, to a recipient by a third-party logistics management service. Letters are, of course, largely deprecated, being the forerunner of another medium, itself rapidly nearing extinction, called email. Some gulker.com readers are old enough to remember, and even use email (your author certainly is and does.)

Younger readers of this site (there are a few) are largely eclectic adventurers who have peeled themselves away from their preferred social medium and cell phone to go slumming in the dim, mist-shrouded back alleys of archaic tech, where a few wizened characters still hunch over gigantic machines called computers – loud, hot, furniture-sized devices that contain mechanical components, like magnetic (!) storage devices.

These living relics (the authors, as well as the machines) produce blogs and web pages, recording information in the cloud much the same way that medieval monks copied out manuscripts (see written out, above) for monastic libraries, thus preserving a great deal of information for posterity, most of which is useless, though a tiny percentage has been found to be interesting, and even important, by certain modern scholars.

But I digress, and have to admit that we’re cheating a bit… our recipient has an administrative assistant (from the old English form secretary) who will print out PDF attachments – a PDF being a digital representation of a printed document that can be attached to email. We are avoiding the logistics service, but, nevertheless, recording the process, for posterity, in this post (see blog above)…

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