Amazing Italics

"As a kid, it was always the concept of italics that got me. I couldn't produce them on my typewriter and even later when I started writing for newspapers, I would still have to underline stuff for the printer to know that it should be in italics. But only a professional typesetter could really do that. Then I saw the Macintosh computer while writing an article for Rolling Stone. I remember we all gathered around this thing in the office and were blown away by how you could set something in italics with a simple mouse click."

I stumbled upon these lines in the recent, meaning Spring 2012, issue of Electronic Beats Magazine on page 71, spoken or skyped out by Steven Levy when communicating with Rick Holland and, as I've been meeting some people recently that were born in the early to mid-90s and naturally grew up with all that power that computers and the internet and mobile communication provides today, which made me think about being a part of the last generation that really knows about and experienced the pre-digital era in their youth. I wonder if they're missing something.