“This was all before the internet, and things moved very slowly. It took nine months for the paper to be reviewed.”

“This was at the dawn of the phylogenetic comparative method era. We didn’t have any of the incredibly sophisticated and intensive computer programs that we have now. The methods we used were based on parsimony, primarily. If I recall correctly, a number of these reconstructions were done by hand. We did simulations, which were done in a very simple computer program, and then the reconstructions, I think, I did them by hand. Actually, I remember doing some of those as I was traveling in South Africa, doing some research on a very different lizard project. I remember being in my room at night, reconstructing ancestral character states, calculating it by hand.”

“This was before computers, so I wrote it up by hand and then typed up the MS for submission. I did all the analyses on a small hand calculator, a Hewlett Packard 67, which I actually still have.”

“This was the time before they had all these rules about carrying endangered species across country lines. It was before they had all of these constraints, regulations and permit processes which interfered with research samples getting in and out. So, that’s the reason we were able to do it.”

“This will seem really old-fashioned! Maggie Norris was the secretary at the Edward Grey Institute. In those days there were professional typists, who would type up your manuscripts on paper, with a carbon copy underneath. The typed manuscript would get sent off to a journal by post and then you would wait for two or three months to hear whether it has been accepted or not. And all the figures were hand drawn, with Letraset spots for the data points on the graphs. Computers and the digital world had still not yet appeared.”

“This would have been in 1999. I do remember that I got an express mail, like a Federal Express envelope, from Science that had the reviews in it. And I remember when I saw that there was a Federal Express envelope from Science in my mailbox, I was like, oh, that’s gotta be good news. They wouldn’t send me a Federal Express letter just to tell me they’ve rejected my paper.”

“Today if you publish a paper like this, you will have lots of people contacting you. In those days that was far from the case.”

“Two decades back, when our paper appeared, there was not anything like Facebook, Twitter, Google Scholar or any other of the current ways for quickly ascertaining whether some publication has had some short-term impact on the audience. It was not possible to know how the paper was received when it was published, or at least I couldn’t. In fact, in those times few of us cared about citations, and life was, in this respect, more enjoyable for researchers than it is now, when hectic immediacy tends to prevail over reflexive pondering.”

“Viewed today, there are many caveats. For instance, there is no paternity determination, as DNA methods were not then available. And the adaptive reasons for female choice of males with long tail could not be studied in this brief experiment. But the successful experimental demonstration of female choice in the wild may have helped encourage subsequent better studies.”

“We created the experiment in the days prior to GPS. We used a tape measure, loppers and machetes to cut shrubs, and a laser transit.”

“We did the analysis on spreadsheets, which again, you would never do now”

“We didn’t have email in those times but I would send him [EO Wilson] information by mail, and I would go back periodically.”

“We send floppy disks by FedEx to exchange data!”

“We submitted it in June 1987, we got comments back quite quickly obviously because we revised it in October and then it was accepted in February and published in December. Back then that was pretty fast. In this day and age, with online publishing, we would have got it out much faster.”

“We used drafting tables and drafting equipment. I had a Leroy Lettering Set made by Keuffel & Esser, which had templates for letters, numbers, etc. You used a stylus that followed the grooved letters on the templates, and wrote the letter on white drafting paper. You just had to space everything by eye, and judge letter sizes the same way. Mistakes could be covered with something called “white-out.” Because you wanted to avoid having a lot of do-overs, I’d make all figures by hand beforehand on graph paper. I doubt that Leroy Lettering sets are still made; when I looked on the web, they are referred to as vintage, and available on sites like ebay.”

“We were a bit constrained by the apparatus. The birds are in a box with a touch screen on the front of it. The touch screen and the reward mechanism that provided the birds with food pellets, those were run by beater PCs, old IBM machines, because it’s a dirty environment. I mean, you’ve got birds and bird poop and bird feathers and dust all over. I wanted equipment that was going to be tough and that, if it went soft on me, I could replace it pretty easily. So we used cheap machines. The whole thing was run with C++ programs on DOS. Very robust, very solid. Initial configurations were accessed from a Linux box in a clean location elsewhere, and the results were written back over the same network links. I could access the Linux box remotely to keep track of how experiments were going, but the individual DOS machines were totally secure – the code itself was not visible from the internet. Moth evolution occurred in stages, one generation of 100 moths per day. A new generation was produced by random breeding within the old one and downloaded each morning when the machines were started up. So, the system had to be capable of doing the evolution of the new morphs each morning when you turned it on. It didn’t take very long. I mean, it was a pretty efficient bit of code. I don’t know, it took maybe about 10 minutes or so, when you first started it. It worked okay. I showed the code to people and they said, oh my god, you did this in DOS! I had all these old DOS tricks to wedge all these great big matrices into the 512 kb memory limits. But it all worked.”

“We were not using Skype, and we were not on the telephone; it (the draft of the manuscript) was all by email. We didn’t have a Google doc or a working folder either. We were just passing it back and forth as attachments.”

“We were, originally, doing playback experiments with a variety of audio equipment [...] sometimes we used a public-address horn speaker, sometimes we used a whacking great cabinet speaker, of the sort you had at a rock concert. So, we were carrying these around the field. Well, that’s another area where things have improved. In order to get decent quality, we were having to carry big speakers, big amplifiers, and whopping great car batteries or lorry batteries to power them. So it was quite a major business. And I think, today, one would be able to get much better playback with much lighter hand-held equipment using lithium-ion battery technology.”

“We wrote the paper by hand or on a typewriter, we drew the graphs by hand, we didn’t have computers to use at that time. They were just coming into being and we were learning how to use them. So, it was all done, really, hands on.”

“Well, it wasn’t that dissimilar. I mean, field work still today is based, in these sorts of studies, [on] regular samples of the observations of particular individuals, and quantitative records of their activities, in this case, the frequency of roaring, the frequency of fighting, the timing of birth, and so on. The difference is that it was all collected either on tape recorders or on check sheets in the field. So one didn’t have tablets or handheld computers, so that one had to either collect it on tape recorders and then transfer it to paper later on, or one had to collect it with check sheets in the field, both of which we did.”