In 1998, I was a sophomore in high school. I learned 'keyboarding' on an electric typewriter.
We had a workbook, and each day we would feed the paper into the machine, and type rows and rows of glad glad glad glad glad glad glad glad or yours yours yours your yours. I am pretty fast typer now, and I know it is because of the typing class and the workbook. If we ever had 'free' typing sessions, I would use that time to type notes to my friends. I still have a few poems and notes that I received from my buddies in my old scrapbooks from high school. Our high school also offered a class in shorthand, which I never took, but might be completely obsolete by now. In 2000, I was a senior in high school. I took a computer class on a Dell computer. We learned the basics of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. In class, I sat beside a friend of mine (who now works in an IT department), and we would create posters to each other and send them over to the 'presses'. Hot and fresh out of the color printer, Brad would lift the white paper up to reveal an ad for hot dogs or smell machines or barf buckets, with his name in comic sans endorsing the product. I was quite clever with my attempts to humiliate without actually offending him. In retaliation, he would make equally borderline inappropriate propaganda and affix my name to it. We had a lot of fun, but we also learned a lot about graphic designs and the programs we were supposed to be learning. When I saw the first iPhone in 2007, I was in awe. It was an incredibly new idea, NO KEYBOARD! Very few buttons, you could interact with everything on the phone by touching the screen. Now, smartphones are commonplace, but when my friend first showed us his phone, there was no doubt in my mind that it would change the world. In 2010, I had been the proud owner of a MacBook for over 5 years. It was issued to me in my first teaching job and I was tethered to it. Using it mostly for researching, writing, editing photos., I spent my Saturday mornings, evenings and school day squinting into the little screen, clacking away at the keys. For Christmas, my husband surprised me with an Apple Watch. It counts my steps, tracks my 'stand goal for the day, and monitors my texts. It knows the temperature, can navigate while I'm driving, and the voice commands are amazingly well received. Sometimes, I look down at the face on my wrist because I feel the haptic alert and I am awe that less than 20 years ago, I was typing glad glad glad glad glad on an old electric type writer.
1 Comment
Sarah W
3/4/2017 06:34:34 pm
It's funny how quickly the times change. We were watching an old show tonight--made in 1949--and the main characters were portrayed by a man and a woman who were born (in real life) in 1888 and 1890, respectively. My thought while watching was, "Wow, I wonder how surreal it was to them to be acting in movies with technology that wasn't around during their childhood, and what would they think of movie and TV today?"
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Mrs. Mitchell
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