The things you notice all these years later

I think he just meant .... like he was still thinking....

I notice how Doogie pauses whenever his writing reached the right side of the screen.. to give the camera enough time to swing back to the left side of the screen. As if reaching the right side of the monitor made him lose his train of thought..

George Carlin: It's all bullsh-t and it's bad for ya.

I notice just how outdated Doogie's computer is!

When I took keyboarding in the '80s, I was taught to use two spaces after a period. Most people these days just use one, but I still use two. I'm doing it right now, but IMDb will correct it to one.

There's actually a pretty strong backlash against those of us who use two spaces. I have no doubt that someday someone will respond to my post here with harsh words. Just Google "two spaces after a period" and you'll find some very strong opinions against two spaces.

A lot of people will say that the two-space rule came about because of the typewriter and monospaced fonts, but that's not entirely true. Yes, the "two spaces" rule itself was due to the typewriter, but a long space following a period had been in use for hundreds of years before the typewriter, and it was used for variable-spaced fonts.

There used two be three types of spaces, a long space (called an em-quad) that went after sentence-concluding period, a smaller space (called an en-quad) that went after a period following an abbreviation (like Mr. and Mrs.), and a very slight space (I forget the name) that went between initials (like J. S. Bach, P. T. Barnum, or P. O. Box).

When typewriters became common, the three space types dwindled to two: a single space and a double space. About the time the computer came along, there was a trend to go to the single space. Modern computer typesetting has a tendency to dislike any two actions in a row, whether it be spaces, returns, tabs, or whatever. So, today there is a strong emphasis on the single space, and advocates for it will make up a lot of facts to justify why you shouldn't use two spaces after a period.

But as a teacher who reads a lot student papers, I can tell you that the papers written by students who use two spaces following a period are much easier for me to read. My peripheral vision senses that a sentence is coming to a stop, and so I understand how to read that last dependent clause, and I also don't read through the period. My strong belief is that the two spaces increases rather than decreases readability, but that may be just me. Try it for yourself.

The best solution would be to have word-processing programs automatically figure out and apply the best typesetting for a document. It would be difficult to do while writing text, but I think there could be a possibility of a "rendering" option that users could employ to create a final version. Different spaces could be applied throughout a document to increase legibility.

That's probably more than you ever wanted to know.

That was commonly taught when typing was paramount. And for the first several years of word processing on computers, typing protocols held sway.

Then as more sophisticated displays became available and WP software advanced, printing protocols led. In printing there is but one space after a period of end dot.

It was common practice on typewriters. Maybe Doogie learned to type on a typewriter in the 1980s.

I was taught to use two spaces after a period in high school in typing class. Has not changed since I started to use a computer.

When using a mechanical typewriter, you use 2 spaces. When using desktop publishing software, you use a single space then replace it with an EM space. In MS Word, these days, it automatically replaces two spaces with an EM space. It's a style and typesetting guideline.