AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

    THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Well, as of late, Del's brain - which at that point was more skedaddled than addled - had been dwelling on an old keyboard buddy that he and the gang had affectionately called 'KATRULZ' but who to the broader public was - and still is - known as UNDO or CTRL-Z. Del, who by his very nature had been prone to making lots of mistakes, would simply murmur 'KATRULZ' (the sound of a child trying to read 'CTRL-Z' as if it were a proper word) and faster than it had taken him to make the mistake, KATRULZ would put everything right again. Or if not exactly 'right,' then in a state of 'pre-wrong' which was good enough. In the early years of computing, many among the merry band of Keyboard comrades, including Del himself, had called Undo 'Santo Katrulz,' on account of his instant miracles. And even now, squatting with his pants down and his mind reeling on a lysergic cocktail enriched with Meth, Opium and Bathing Sa

   THE STORY OF DEL - Delete But he and everybody else needed to go beyond the bad optics because Del was working on a new 'computer key' - a command that one day would surely be installed on the keyboard of every device, big or small, real or virtual. And PERMANENTLY installed! Or if not permanently, then for at least 10,000 consecutive years - without a chance of being ousted the way those heartless FUTHER-MUCKERS had ousted him!   Barring the very real likelihood of some scientist in Switzerland muttering 'oops' under his breath before accidentally compacting the entire universe into a single atom through an interconnection of black holes... ...Del's new button would never die! Yes - DAMN IT! - he meant it! That button had to be! Who knows if that bouncer, who only two months earlier had been hauling heavy metal parts at the Electrotyazhmash tractor factory of Kharkiv, would have been impressed had he understood a single word of Del's peroration?! Later, Del

  THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Even in his messed-up state, Del knew it was decidedly wrong to ruin someone's $320 Carré d’agneau de Pauillac rôti en cocotte gâteau d’aubergines for any reason whatsoever… ...let alone with a ghastly spectacle of ' Turds sur la Lawn ,' but there was an obsessed method to his madness, a reason behind it all that made him talk back to the cops and bouncers who'd promptly hustle him off the premises. No! He wasn't merely defecating on private property, no, no, no! It was for a noble cause, it was high-tech... it was research... it was... it was… Once, while being hauled away, he even told the strapping bouncer that he could understand and forgive the equivocation. He himself had run a Google search and in all of human history - surely a very long time! - only 423 people had ever called crapping outside expensive restaurants 'High-Tech' or 'Research.' 423 out of the 107 billion people calculated to have ever lived on Plan

   THE STORY OF DEL - Delete But on that day of their chance encounter, Ctrl and Alt were dressed in mourning and looking terribly grim: they had just returned from funeral services for not one, not two, but five top-row Function Keys that had overdosed on painkillers! Poor bastards! Function Keys on a tablet were about as useful as doilies on a Kawasaki. Yet another jinxed day in an ever-worsening calendar. After scoring his 'psycho-spiritual' enhancements (all but a few of which were physically devastating), Del would leave the sidewalk emporiums, and go wandering around Frisco's posh Nob Hill neighborhood where - without fail - he'd make a point of relieving himself outside the expensive restaurants favored by the tech oligarchs, actors, and politicians.  

  THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Well, Del's spirit took a plunge and - like so many other superannuated components of the Tech industry - he foolishly sought the relief of additives and mood-enhancers: pills, powders, potions, pellets, snuffs, sprinkles, beverages... and even gels!    For a couple of months he was above it all, happy and high, but then the law of diminishing returns kicked in and - as expected - he hit the skids. REAL HARD. From the warm and tidy keyboards he had once called home, he was out on the wild streets doing rough deals and sharing tweets & needles with perfect strangers. Well, not everyone was a stranger. On rare occasions he'd bump into a few other banished keys, like CTRL Almighty and Sexy ALT. Oh what a team they had once been! Back in the day, the three of them together 'CTRL-ALT-DEL' had packed a bigger wallop than 20 straight tequilas followed by a sucker punch from Mike Tyson. Only the Commodore Amiga's legendary 'Guru Meditat

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph