I had some time to talk with my youngest son today while we waited for an appointment. I mentioned learning how to type on a manual typewriter, and he started asking questions about some of the technology I have used over the years. It made me realize just how much has changed since I was a child.
Most women don't disclose their age, but I am proud of my 48 years. They have been great years, and I have lived through a lot of history. For example, I remember when Nixon resigned. I was playing with my doll while my mother ironed Dad's shirts. She used our old creaky ironing board, and the iron was shiny steel with a black braided cord. She put her thumb over the opening of a Coke bottle full of water and shook it over the clothes so that little drops of water sprayed the cloth. The iron made sizzling noises as she worked. She pointed at the television, which showed the face of a man talking, and said, "Watch this. It will be in your history books all the way through school, for the rest of your life." She was right.
My mother loved to play records on our stereo. If she particularly loved a piece of music, she would learn to play it on the piano. I grew up listening to her version of Brubeck's "Take Five." I've seen him play it a couple of times, but it never sounded quite right. He doesn't hesitate during the bridge, like Mom does. Oddly enough, that's where I hesitate, too, but because my hands aren't quite large enough to play the chords, not because it's how the piece should sound.
Instead of taking Home Ec, I took wood shop and learned how to use woodworking tools and became utterly hooked. Later I took auto shop and was equally enthralled. I love working with my hands. Cars have changed a lot since then, and now I take mine to a mechanic who doesn't mind talking me through whatever work he does. He's a wonderful man, and he would be surprised to know that I consider him a friend.
Since I played the piano, typing was easy to learn. My class was the last one to use a manual typewriter. The teacher believed that if you learned on a manual, you could always switch to an electric, but the reverse was seldom true. The next year he retired and the district replaced all of the old typewriters with new electric ones. I still type as if I were trying to get a sticky key to strike all the way to the ribbon. I haven't worn out any keyboards yet, but there's still time.
My advanced algebra class was the first one in the district to allow students to use calculators. This was 1980, and my calculator was huge and had only the four basic functions. To a math student severely limited by dyslexia, it was a godsend. I still can derive square roots by hand, because it was so much easier than trying to use a slide rule. I'm so lucky I didn't have to take the class a year earlier, because I never did learn how to accurately match the lines on the middle slider and then interpret them.
When I went to college, I was a music major. On my first day, a guy walked into class wearing headphones. I thought it was some sort of hearing aid and politely looked away, feeling devastated at the sacrifices this kid must have endured to become a musician despite his hearing loss. The next day, he took the headphones off and handed them to me and told me to listen. It made me a little queasy to put someone's hearing aid on, but I didn't want to offend him. I still remember the awe I felt as I listened to a Beethoven symphony playing on what turned out to be a Sony Walkman. I couldn't believe the quality of the sound; it far surpassed any kind of recording I had yet experienced. I sat there listening until both of us were late to our next class, picking out individual instruments and listening to elements of the polyphony that I had never realized were there. It was a glorious experience.
My first computer was an Apple IIe, which was a DOS machine. No mouse, just keyboard shortcuts. Aside from the glowing yellow letters on the black screen, it wasn't all that different from my shiny new IBM Selectric typewriter. I was very careful not to ruin the 5.5" floppy disks that held my boss's files. Those files had names that were restricted to eight characters, because that was all the operating system could handle. I printed all documents on a daisy wheel printer. I loved watching it spin around as it printed version after version of the (truly terrible) book my boss was writing.
In January 1984, my boss came into the office with a large box in his arms. He opened it and took out a smaller grey plastic box with a little screen on it. He plugged it in, handed me a document, and said, "I need this by two o'clock." He didn't get it on time.
The little grey machine was the earliest Apple Macintosh, and it was the first computer to use windows. It was also the first mouse I had ever used, although I had seen one demonstrated earlier. The Mac, as it was affectionately called, had 375 K (no, that's not a typo) of memory, uncompiled software, and no user manual. It was the first computer to be "user-friendly" (a new term coined just for it) and did not need such primitive things. It used a dot-matrix printer and was the first machine I had ever seen that could print music. My instructors LOVED my assignments after that, as I was the only music student ever to have printed their composition homework on a computer -- at least at that college. I didn't tell them how I laboriously created each one out of hundreds of tiny lines and dots. I didn't want to ruin the mystique, and I certainly didn't want to admit how much I enjoyed manipulating those images. It didn't matter how much time it took; it was worth it to me.
In 1998, I leveraged some old musicology papers and a school committee report into my first tech writing contract. I had the newest Mac available, a shiny black laptop, and I was willing to do software documentation for both Macs and PCs. Very few writers did this kind of cross-platform documentation, but it came naturally to me. I've been writing ever since. I think I'm here to stay.
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