A Fancy Typewriter

I interviewed my mom, who has always been a big literacy sponsor for me. Education is a huge part of our family. Apparently my great-great grandparents on my mom’s side were college graduates, so I’m a fifth-generation college student. This isn’t surprising considering the fact that it was never a question of “if” I go to college, but rather “when” I go to college. One of the questions that I asked my mom that stuck out to me was about computer literacy. Computers and technology are such a huge part of our life now that it’s hard for me to imagine life without it. Writing a paper without Google? Inconceivable! At one point, my mom talked about how she essentially used a computer she had access to in college as a fancy typewriter. She wrote out her essays by hand and used the computer to type, print, and save the final draft.

My excerpt:

In contrast to the emphasis that was put on computer literacy in my elementary school (I distinctly remember a typing class in fifth grade), there wasn’t that kind of literacy in my mom’s education – simply because they weren’t around! The first computer she saw was a PC her Geometry teacher had in high school, but she didn’t get to use a computer until college when her friend let her use one. Even then, she says, it was still common to write with a typewriter. This PC was on loan from the friend’s brother-in-law who was, as my mom describes, “an early computer geek”. Her friend kept a sticky note on the edge of the screen with instructions for all the function keys and how to print, etc. While students today generally type everything (including notes, drafts, etc.) on their computer, my mom says she usually used it as a fancy typewriter. All of her first and second drafts were handwritten and then she’d use the computer to print and save the final draft.