Only people more than thirty years old will be able to understand what I am about to say concerning technology. I learned my keyboarding skills in high school on an old Corona manual typewriter. The teacher would smack us on the back of our hands with a ruler if we allowed our wrists to drop or she thought we were making too many errors. The hours I spent in that classroom learning how to type seems, now, like a nightmare. I would leave class with sore fingers from pressing down on the keys--it takes a lot of pressure to imprint a keystroke from a manual typewriter. More often, the backs of my hands would be sore from receiving swats from the dreaded ruler. I guess she did her job, because I've always retained my ability to type. Go figure!
The next greatest thing was the electric typewriter. What a godsend that was! Even greater, was the correction tape that they came out with. If you miskeyed a stroke then you simply inserted this tape into the typewriter and typed over the stroke and replaced it with the correct letter. It was light years ahead of "Whiteout" which was like a white paint that you had to blow on and let dry before you could make a correction. I can remember spending hours and hours typing a two or three page paper. Many of those hours were used to correct miskeyed strokes. Luckily, however, very few papers were required to be typed when I was in high school. I think that teachers understood the hassles that typing imposed, and they would allow us to turn in our papers in long-hand as long as the writing was legible. I wonder now how office people who typed for a living ever did their jobs. It had to be tough.
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Tim, the text below was written as brainstorming for my technology narrative. Your stories about learning to type on manual and then electric typewriters made me want to share:
ReplyDeleteWe didn't have a computer in my home until I was in high school. So when my seventh grade class went to the High School computer lab to learn a little bit about computer basics, I might as well have been staring at a popular wall-calendar or poster. I'd seen plenty of computers on the desks of teachers, librarians, and secretaries at my school, but I had never used one myself. Fortunately, the high school computer teacher at that time was more than willing to teach me and my fellow seventh-graders from the assumption that none of us had ever laid eyes on a computer before. Unfortunately, I had poor listening skills. I followed along fairly well until I missed the part about the return key. Thus I used the space bar to get to the next line of text when answering the teacher's questions, which were posed to get us typing and hitting the return key and executing a few other simple commands. I was too busy hitting the space bar fifty-five times in between my typed responses. Of course I fell behind and didn't answer most of the questions, let alone learn how to work on the computer. So I completely screwed up that exercise.
Right before our class left, the teacher told all of us to close the programs we had open and shut down our computers. At this point, I had given up on the word-processor and moved on with my classmates to Netscape 5.0 and Yahoo.com. I followed along a little better than before, partially because I was tired to sweating in self-conscious anxiety as I glanced at my classmates' computers in the hope of divining how to not have to hit the space bar seventy times and partially because the teacher was giving us more free reign and less directions. So I had a couple programs open because, of course, I hadn't known how to close the word-processing software. I was terrified to just punch the power button on the tower, since the teacher, in a rather imposing voice, made it abundantly clear that the computers would either explode or melt down into a heap of very expensive plastic for which we would be responsible for paying with blood, sweat, and tears (or at least that's what I understood him to say at the time). I turned to one of my classmates and asked him how to close the programs so that the computer wouldn't be hurt when I turned it off. He looked at me with slack-faced disbelief tinged with reserved disgust. "Uh, there are multiple ways you can do it," he began. A nearby girl interjected, "Just click the x in the corner."
Luckily, I had been staring at the windows long enough to readily know which x she meant. I closed my programs, sighing in profound relief. Then I had to ask how to shut down the computer.