Kayla’s rant about iPads and her description of college tech was striking to me. She ASSUMED (accurately) that anyone going to college these days has a computer. Yup, access to a computer isn’t a luxury for students these days, it is a necessity. (As she then goes on to point out, iPads, on the other hand, are luxuries.)
It got me thinking about my own college days. When I was working on my undergraduate degree we had a room in each dorm with four or five computers. For the most part they were used for math and science calculations rather than writing and it you wanted access to one you had to wait in line.
Six months after graduating from college I was in graduate school. By that time I had gone high-tech. Yup, no more typewriter for me! Instead I used this…
Yes, the Brother. WP1!
Image captured from YouTube video
It was amazing(ly slow) and if you typed too quickly it just locked up until it caught up. Hard to imagine I wrote so many of my papers on it. Oh the times they are achangin’!
Wow. I feel fortunate to have access to systems with Wordperfect on them! Even then I wrote my paopers in a wordprocessor….but they were just more than glorified text editors since most papers were printed on a Dot Matrix printer!
I started writing my papers online around my junior undergrad year. I had to use vi on a UNIX system and the nroff text processing language at first, but even so it was a big improvement over typewriting, and a *huge* improvement over handwriting. Especially *my* handwriting.