Writing Negentropy Before Word Processing
By Nelson McKeeby
The primary challenge I faced when starting Negentropy in 1979 was not a lack of ideas. As an autistic individual, I possessed a rapid writing pace and an almost continuous writing habit. My output was substantial even before the game commenced, encompassing a wide range of subjects such as fiction, scientific concepts, people, places, equipment, maps, and anything else that piqued my interest. Negentropy swiftly absorbed at least half of this output, as almost anything I learned had potential applications within the project. For instance, a book on electricity could be transformed into a Project equipment note, a Scout pamphlet could be repurposed as an article on surveying or weather, a conversation with someone who had used a specific machine could influence the equipment issued to Troubleshooters, and a map could serve as the foundation for an adventure. The project expanded exponentially as research and writing mutually enriched each other, allowing me to seamlessly transition between subjects without leaving the confines of the same fictional world.
However, this vast scale of output presented a practical problem almost immediately. I could generate material at an unprecedented rate, but I struggled to organize, reproduce, or preserve it effectively. In contrast, today, writing is often perceived as a process that occurs within files, which can be easily searched, duplicated, backed up, and copied without any loss. In 1979, my working archive was entirely paper-based. Most of it consisted of ordinary lined paper covered in pencil marks. I preferred printing rather than writing in cursive and frequently used the pages. For instance, a note about a person might be extracted while I was writing a story, then reused when I was crafting an adventure, and subsequently compared against a map or equipment description. The same sheet could be handled multiple times. Over time, the pencil faded, edges tore, pages became detached from related ones, and valuable material could be lost in the midst of other stacks of notes. As the project gained greater success, the task of locating previously written material became increasingly challenging.
Pencil as the First Database
The earliest Negentropy archive wasn’t a neatly organized collection of notebooks by subject. Instead, it was a chaotic mass of handwritten material. I would jot down ideas, use them, modify them, refer to them later, and often write new versions because the initial drafts were too difficult to find quickly. The paper itself was an integral part of the development process. A single page wasn’t a permanent record; it was a tool that circulated until it was replaced, lost, or became too faint to use comfortably.
This approach made preserving the early material challenging, even though it’s easy to underestimate. Thousands of pages have survived, but most of them weren’t created as archival documents. They were intended for immediate use. Pencil on lined paper can surprisingly withstand careful storage and minimal handling, but these pages were subjected to constant movement. They were carried, stacked, unfolded, shuffled, and read repeatedly. Some were written lightly, while others accumulated smudges and lost corners. Some survived only because they happened to be tucked inside a folder or between later papers. The material that’s easiest to read today may not have been the most important at the time. It might simply be the material that received the least amount of handling.
As a result, reconstructing the development of Negentropy involves partly recovering an old working system. A surviving page might contain a completed idea, an abandoned idea, a note copied from somewhere else, or a temporary solution that was replaced a week later. Many pages lack dates because I didn’t anticipate needing to establish the exact timeline of one version replacing another decades later. The primary concern at the time was whether I could find the information when I needed it for the next story or game. The archive was organized around practical use rather than historical accuracy.
The Smith-Corona Electric C/T
The formal rules were different because they had to be reproducible. Players couldn’t share a stack of pencil notes every time we wanted to play. So, the rules moved onto a Smith-Corona Electric C/T. I typed the material that needed to circulate, and those pages could then be photocopied.
The early rules were very small, but the small size is misleading if someone looks at them today and assumes they represented the whole game. The typed rules were only the common operating instructions. Most of the intellectual content surrounding them remained handwritten in articles, setting notes, equipment descriptions, stories, maps, and research material.
Typing also changed the character of revision. On paper, I could cross something out, write another line above it, or simply start a new page. A typewritten master was more expensive in time. If I changed enough of a paragraph, the practical solution was often to retype the page. If the change shifted the text onto the next page, more than one page might have to be retyped. The mechanics of production encouraged me to keep the formal rules compact. This wasn’t the reason the game was rules-light, but it reinforced the choice. A short general rule that handled many situations was easier to maintain than a growing catalogue of special cases.
Photocopying created another boundary between what was public and what was private. The rules could exist in several copies, while the source material often existed only once. A player might have a photocopied rules sheet while the explanation of a radio, the history of a settlement, or the notes behind an adventure remained in my own papers. The practical game therefore depended on a mixture of reproduced rules and an enormous personal reference archive. That pattern persisted for years.
Writing as Production Work
I spent an unexpected amount of time trying to streamline the process itself. The challenge wasn’t just writing a sentence; I needed to be able to write, find it later, revise it, produce a clean copy when necessary, and prevent older information from disappearing. Every advancement in writing technology promised to eliminate one of these bottlenecks.
This made the development of Negentropy inextricably linked to the physical tools used to create it. The game wasn’t developed in a modern environment where text could be reorganized without cost. Moving a section from one place to another could mean copying it by hand or retyping it. Merging two versions required sitting with both in front of me and creating a third. A spelling correction on a handwritten page was trivial, but altering the structure of a typed article could mean producing another complete master copy. An idea that belonged in three different places could be copied three times, and once those copies existed, they might develop independently.
That last problem became increasingly significant as the project expanded. I might have one description of an organization in a story, another in a game note, and a third in an equipment or setting article. If I changed the idea, there was no automatic way to discover every place where the old version remained. Continuity became a memory issue and a paper search problem. I often remembered having written something without being able to pinpoint the exact page that contained it. When that happened, I could either lose time searching or reconstruct the idea and continue. Reconstruction kept the work moving, but it also created layers of slightly different versions that later required reconciliation.
The Macintosh 512
The first significant transformation occurred in 1985 when my family acquired a Macintosh 512. While word processing didn’t instantly make Negentropy effortless, it redefined the concept of revision. Text no longer had to remain in the order I first typed it. I could insert a paragraph without retyping everything below it. I could move a section, duplicate text, correct recurring errors, and create another pristine copy without generating an entirely new physical master.
For a project as extensive and dynamic as Negentropy, this was a game-changer. The crucial advantage wasn’t that the Macintosh enhanced the visual appeal of words on a screen. It reduced the cost of revision. I could afford to change my mind more frequently because a change no longer demanded the same amount of manual effort. This encouraged more substantial reorganizations and made it easier to transform collections of notes into coherent documents.
The transition was gradual because the Macintosh didn’t automatically assimilate the existing paper archive. Thousands of pages still existed only in pencil. While new writing could be created electronically, old writing required retyping if I wanted it in the new system. Consequently, I was operating two archives simultaneously: a growing electronic body of current work and a much larger paper archive that still contained older information, abandoned versions, stories, diagrams, and notes. Word processing improved production before addressing the preservation aspect.
The LaserWriter II
In 1988, I purchased a LaserWriter II and connected it to the Macintosh 512. This further altered the production side of the project. A word processor proved useful even when the final output still relied on less flexible printing methods. However, a laser printer enabled the direct production of clean masters from the electronic text. The finished page could resemble a publication rather than a typed draft, and another corrected copy could be generated without retyping anything.
For Negentropy, this was more crucial than cosmetic improvements. Clean masters were easier to replicate, read, and consider authoritative. Electronic revisions could be made, and the document could be printed as a complete replacement for the previous version. This distinction between working drafts and finished copies became clearer. I could now think in terms of editions of a document rather than a single physical master accumulating corrections.
The LaserWriter also integrated layout into the writing process. Headings, spacing, page breaks, and the visual organization of information could be controlled more deliberately. This became significant because Negentropy wasn’t just fiction; it contained rules, equipment descriptions, technical articles, forms, maps, and reference material. Different types of information required distinct visual structures. Once these structures could be reliably produced, the project began to resemble the kind of sourcebooks I had envisioned much earlier.
The Macintosh Classic and Portable Work
Later, I purchased a Macintosh Classic with a hard drive and used it in a manner similar to how I would later use a laptop. While the machine wasn’t portable by modern standards, it allowed me to move a substantial portion of the working project with me. A hard drive also expanded the scope of what could be immediately accessible. I no longer had to consider every document as something that resided primarily on paper or removable media.
That convenience introduced a new organizational challenge. Once it became easy to create files, I created many of them. Electronic storage solved the problem of physical degradation, but it didn’t automatically address naming, duplication, version control, or retrieval. A file could be perfectly preserved but still effectively lost if I couldn’t remember its name or which disk or directory contained the current version. The project transitioned from stacks of paper to an electronic filing problem, but the underlying issue remained familiar: I was still producing material faster than my organizational system could comfortably handle.
Archiving to CD-R
By 1990, a job purchased a CD-R system that I could use for archiving. At the time, this seemed like a significant solution to a longstanding problem. Optical media offered a durable copy that was less vulnerable than a working disk and could hold significantly more material than the removable storage I had previously relied on. For the first time, I could seriously consider preserving large volumes of electronic work as an archive rather than merely keeping the current working copy intact.
However, this didn’t make the archive permanent. Every storage technology comes with its own assumptions about drives, interfaces, file formats, operating systems, and the availability of hardware capable of reading the medium in the future. A CD-R was far safer than a single working disk, but only if future machines could still read it and future software could still interpret the files. The preservation problem had shifted again. Paper faded and tore, magnetic media failed or became obsolete, and optical media could survive physically while the necessary equipment to use it disappeared.
Therefore, I learned very early that saving a file and preserving a work are not the same task. Preservation requires migration. Material must be transferred from one generation of technology to another before the old generation becomes inaccessible. As the archive grows larger, the labor required for migration increases.
The Archive Today
That labor continues unabated. I’ve dedicated a significant amount of time to recovering early Negentropy material because the surviving archive spans multiple technological eras. Some of it is handwritten on lined paper, while some exists as typed and photocopied pages. Others survive in early Macintosh files, and later material is stored on hard drives, optical media, and newer digital storage. The current project goes beyond mere writing; it aims to bring together these diverse eras into a searchable, comparable, revised, and preserved format.
The most challenging aspect is the pencil material, as there’s no easy way to restore the context surrounding a page. Scanning can preserve the image, but it doesn’t provide information about whether the page was current, superseded, or connected to another sheet now stored elsewhere. Transcription makes the text searchable, but it introduces a new layer of potential errors. Dating the material often relies on internal clues, such as a character who hadn’t been renamed, a weapon that was later replaced, an early version of a location, or a reference to a game session that can be independently dated.
The volume of material also significantly impacts the nature of the task. Saving ten pages is straightforward, but saving thousands of pages spanning decades is an archival project. It requires careful decisions about filenames, folders, scans, transcription, duplicates, versions, and determining which material should be considered historical evidence rather than current canon. The work is slow precisely because the original creative process was fast.
How Technology Shaped the Game
Production technology played a pivotal role in shaping the development of Negentropy, influencing not only its survival but also its growth. Initially reliant on handwritten notes, the project embraced modular articles, allowing me to write about a single subject without reorganizing an entire book. The challenge of retyping fostered concise general rules, while photocopying made short, commonly used documents practical, preserving the larger source archive in my possession. Word processing later facilitated larger revisions and reconciliations, and laser printing made clean sourcebooks feasible. Hard drives and optical media enabled the retention of a vast amount of current material without transforming every revision into a physical stack of paper.
The project also evolved around the expectation that information could exist independently and later be combined. This concept is one reason Negentropy transformed into a series of source articles rather than a single rulebook attempting to encompass everything. I could write about various subjects, such as radios, agriculture, medicine, weapons, engineering, settlements, or individuals, as separate pieces and then utilize that material wherever it became relevant. Long before the advent of hyperlinks or searchable digital archives, the project already functioned like a network of interconnected documents.
Ironically, the very structure that facilitated Negentropy’s expansion also posed challenges in managing the early paper archive. The game was designed to allow almost any useful subject to enter the world, and I was able to write about these subjects swiftly. Consequently, each new article enhanced the value of the archive while simultaneously increasing the effort required for its maintenance. Despite advancements in technology, this tension persisted, simply increasing the amount of material that could be actively utilized.
This project is not about old computers.
I don’t view this history as a nostalgic longing for typewriters, early Macintosh computers, or obsolete storage media. I fondly remember those machines because they addressed real problems, but the crucial aspect is what each one enabled me to accomplish that I couldn’t efficiently do before. The Smith-Corona facilitated reproducible rules, while photocopying allowed those rules to circulate. The Macintosh 512 made revisions flexible, and the LaserWriter II made clean publication masters practical. Hard-drive storage made a substantial working library portable enough to keep close at hand. CD-R made large-scale electronic archiving conceivable.
Each change transformed the project because writing is intrinsically linked to the machinery used to preserve and revise it. A large project strains whatever system it resides in. Paper becomes difficult to search, typewritten pages become expensive to revise, early disks become too small, file systems become crowded, and storage formats become obsolete. The solution at every stage is temporary because increased capacity encourages increased production.
That’s why the history of Negentropy encompasses an ongoing effort to make technology work efficiently. I wasn’t waiting for computers to enhance my productivity; I was already producing more than my tools could comfortably manage. Every new technology was an attempt to bridge the gap between the speed at which I could create material and the speed at which I could organize and preserve it.
What Survived
The fact that so much early material survives at all is partly accidental and partly the result of repeated attempts to save it. Some important pages are lost, others are too faint or fragmentary to interpret confidently, and many survive without dates. Nevertheless, the remaining body is substantial enough to demonstrate that the modern Negentropy project didn’t emerge suddenly when digital tools became available. The computers made it easier to consolidate, revise, and publish a body of work that had already been accumulating for years.
When I work on Negentropy now, I often find myself juggling two tasks simultaneously. I’m writing new material while simultaneously recovering old material into a format that can withstand another technological transition. These activities are inherently linked. The project has always involved making decisions about what should be retained, what should be revised, and how information from different eras should be made usable again.
Therefore, the most significant change between 1979 and today is not that I finally acquired a machine capable of handling the project. No machine has ever been able to do so entirely. The change is that the tools have gradually enabled more of the project to exist in a form that can be searched, compared, duplicated, and preserved without the need to handle the sole surviving copy. This is a substantial improvement over a deteriorating pencil page, but the underlying problem persists: I still write faster than I can organize what I’ve written.