Wow, have the methods and technology of covering sports changed since I covered my first Olympics 20 years ago in Los Angeles. In fact, compared with all the toys and gadgets I have to lug around with me every day, it seems prehistoric, as if we were writing on stone tablets.

Way back in 1984, we reporter types still used typewriters. (Remember those? And the typing classes we used to take to learn to use them correctly?) The Main Press Center and the press center at Santa Anita Racetrack were full of them, banks of typewriters on desks for us to use. Those of you under 25 will be amazed to find out that we typed our stories on to paper, edited or corrected them with pens or pencils, and then typesetters retyped them. In fact, that’s how we dealt with all the copy at the Chronicle until the late ’80s.

From Los Angeles, I sent the stories I wrote on the three-day event and the dressage for the magazine (along with my film) back to Middleburg via either FedEx or UPS, which were each then revolutionizing overnight business delivery. Four years later in Seoul, the fax had been invented, and, man, was that revolutionary. Whole documents in minutes–holy cow!!

In Seoul there were still lots and lots of typewriters available to us writers. But by 1992 in Barcelona, typewriters were becoming an endangered species as more and more reporters were using an exotic and expensive creation called a laptop computer, and I guess they connected them to their company’s network at the office. But the fax was still the thing in communications.

In 1996 we at the Chronicle fully entered the computer age, changing to a Macintosh desktop publishing system, so I too had a laptop computer in Atlanta. And for the very first time, I e-mailed my stories to the office on that brand-new thing called the Internet.

And by 2000 the Internet had changed everything–it had made daily coverage absolutely mandatory on websites, which we’d started doing shortly after creating our website in 1998. But there was something else new–digital photography. No more film. No more going to the photo lab. Photos in seconds! Unbelievable! We didn’t have a digital camera for me to take to Sydney, but photographer Charlie Mann did. So for the first time our daily coverage included photos.

And the next spring we purchased our first digital camera. Actually, it’s the one I’m using here because it’s the one I’m used to using. So now, whenever I or one of the other members of the Chronicle’s editorial staff cover the Olympics, the World Equestrian Games, the Rolex Kentucky CCI, Devon, the National Horse Show, the U.S. Freestyle Championships, we strap to our backs an oversized camera backpack for the digital camera, two or three lenses and another bag with the laptop computer needed to download the photos. Of course, we also have to use the computer to write and send our reports and photos so you can read them in minutes. We look like we’re leaving for a three-day hike.

Reporting used to be pretty simple: Watch the action, interview the players (and there didn’t used to be too much of a rush to do that), take notes, and then write your story. Somebody else specialized in the mechanical aspects of actually putting our stories on the page. And somebody else developed and printed our photos, before somebody else put them on the page with our words. Now, we have to do most of those steps ourselves–plus we have to get online, right now, no matter where we are. And the technology involved in all that, to my pre-21st century brain, is daunting.

In fact, sometimes I get paranoid about it. (Of course, if certain members of the Chronicle staff would stop laughing at my anxiety, I might not feel that way!) And here, in Athens, I feel subconscious surrounded by dozens of full-time photographers, who handle their cameras (and the computer programs they use to manipulate and store their photos) every day. They do it all by second nature, while for the first few days I sit there concentrating intently on everything I do (sometimes failing miserably) with each piece of expensive equipment.

By the way, just to prove how untechnological I am, I wrote this journal–and all the other Athens Journals so far–long hand, on a legal pad, on the bus ride from Ag. Andreas to Markopoulo. Just to prove that, yes, pens and paper do still communicate human thought!