I'll be over here in the rocking chair, rocking

[mamadeb]

Someone on my friendslist, one of the many college students, just said, and I paraphrase, that she sent in her paper with errors, but fortunately she has time to correct them and send it in again.

And all of you who are currently or recently college students or, possibly, professors, are nodding.



But it's making me feel, oh, so old. Because when I was first in college, in the eighties, you *typed* your papers. Sometimes, if you were ambitious and/or organized, you *retyped* them. If you made mistakes even after that, you took out a pen or a pencil and corrected them - that's why they were doublespaced. And once you handed in your papers - and that meant physically handing them to the professor *or* placing them in their physical mailbox - that was *it*.

Later on, in the later eighties, when I had access to a computer, I did word process them (using, I believe, a shareware clone of Wordstar) and print them out, although my profs weren't happy because I was using dot matrix and dot matrix was hard to read, even in the highest quality print, and you had all these perforations around the edges. So some teachers still prefered typed papers. And they *all* had to be handed in.

And...I'm intensely jealous. Just leave it at that.

Comments

[wolfshark]

I went to college in the early nineties, and the part about having to physically hand it in? I *so* relate. And if the campus printers were down, you were *screwed* because no one had their own machines!

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Campus printers.

We had them in the computer labs. And I think there were some Apples, too.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I learned to type on manual typewriters.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Same here. And I was well impressed by the first computer I ever used - 1982, an Apple using WordStar 1.1. And, yes, we had to physically print our papers and take them to the profs. They wouldn't have known what to do with a disk.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I think these kids are maybe emailing theirs.
Wow.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

As did I.

This stuff? Piece of *cake*.

[cyprinella]

Well, I learned on electric typewriters, in this class where the only way to get an A was to a) type 80 WPM or b) brown nose like none other. I"m talking cookies and car washes.

My mom has this old manual that's a thing of beauty.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

That's some spoiled teacher.

I got electric typewriters when I moved from Brooklyn to a wealthyish suburb in New Jersey. (And, honestly, we couldn't afford to live there and left four years later.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Me also. Though only for the first half of the year-long typewriting class, because us poor end-of-the-alphabet people were guaranteed an electric second semester.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

It may depend where you live, as well as when.

They don't bother now, do they?

[magid.livejournal.com]

I think there are 'keyboarding' classes in some high schools, at least.

[azurelunatic]

I had keyboarding in elementary and middle schools. (1986-1994).

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

There, there. A lot of places (and individual teachers) still require work to be handed in in hard copy. (Why should they use up paper and ink to do the student's job for them? Or, more importantly, why should they risk infecting their computer by accepting an attachment that may have a virus?)

My mother has been griping at me about the ease of writing papers on the computer, though, since I was in high school and she realized I could add a footnote with a keystroke. The woman typed her doctoral dissertation (in the early 70's) on a typewriter, and the two horror stories that stick with me are about footnotes and margins. You get to where you have a footnote, you take out the page and type the footnote on another page, measure up from the bottom, and then mark the first page where you're going to have to stop writing in order to fit the footnote on that page. (Good lord, it's no wonder they invented endnotes. But in these days of computer typesetting, I hate them.) And margins! Theses had very strict regulations wrt margins, because they were going to be recorded on microfilm and anything over the limit wouldn't get captured on the camera-ready whatever. So the department secretary had a template, and she held it over each page, and if the text ran into the margin she crossed out the page with a big red marker and the page had to be retyped. (And, naturally, so did every page after it, if the first one ran over the page break when it was fixed. Gah. Gah. Gah.)

We know how fortunate we are. :-)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I only used endnotes. Everyone I knew only used endnotes. Footnotes were far too much trouble. And I wrote history papers.

I didn't have to worry about margins, but I do remember the wonder of Mar Rel. And the bell to move the return lever - I even used an electric with a return lever. The return key? Amazing.

Auto-return? Even more amazing - especially when you combined it with correction.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

Oh, God. I remember taking 30 minutes to produce a page of submission-ready copy, and even that page would be so leprous with White-Out that if I shook it the flakes would fall off.

And heaven help you if you were working in a field that required the use of weird alphabetical characters, like Anglo-Saxon.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

One of my college jobs was as a temp secretary. I remember one place where I had to type a letter on an electric.

I typed that letter four times. The man was incredibly patient.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

One of my graduation presents (from high school) was an electric typewriter. Yeah, been there.

Although later, when I moved to a dot-matrix printer, I used the paper that had detachable perfs, and tried to get the edges reasonably smooth.

I like my multifunction unit now, thanks. Photocopy (b/w OR color!), scan, print (and a sheet feeder). It does fax, but I think I am going back to WinFax, because the incoming on the printer can't be saved as computer-openable image files.

At least we've made actual progress in ONE area.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Laser cut dot-matrix paper helped a lot.

We only have the inkjet and it's way old. Time for a new one.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend a good all-in-one unit. It's been invaluable so far. This one is the Canon PIXMA MP780 (http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=116&modelid=10444); we got it when Staples had it at something like 40% off. In fact, that sort of sale is what I'd recommend looking for; while I knew I preferred Canon, I was willing to go for HP or another brand if it had the specs I wanted, and when this was there, we jumped.

Now must learn to refill ink cartridges. (I REALLY want to re-enable our old laser printer for black-and-white printing; it's sharper and I think cheaper, but space is not, at the moment, available. Nor the money for a new drum, which it needs.)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

At this point, we haven't felt the need for more than a printer - we both have access to faxes and copy machines at work (so long as we're not unreasonable about it - since I purchase the supplies at work, I almost never use those machines for myself) and we haven't felt the need for a scanner.

Also, there's space considerations. We have room for a printer.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Well this is an exception. Usualy I do only hand in one final draft, though yes, the convenience of computers still applies. In this case, he's been helping me write it all along, since it's also my thesis, and he's my thesis advisor.

I used to handwrite papers until I hit high school, since it wasn't required to have them typed, and I would start writing in my notebook. Sometimes my mom would type them up for me.

But I love my laptop, since I take notes on it, and everything can be copied and pasted. :)

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

This was someone else, actually. She's not even going to school in the US, from what I gather.

I want a laptop.

[sorek.livejournal.com]

I remember my first word processing program. It ran on a Radio Shack Tandy Color Computer II (hereafter referred to as the CoCo II). The CoCo was Radio Shack's (poor) answer to the Commodore 64. The word processing program didn't have anything close to WYSIWYG, it's answer was to have two modes, a mode in which you typed the text, and a "visual" mode which showed your text as small gray boxes. Think of a pdf at a magnification too small to read, like 10% or so. The visual mode was mostly useful for showing how much of a page your text took up and helping you decide if your paragraphs were short/long enough. I don't remember if it could do italics, bold, or underline and you could forget about changing font type/size.

On a separate note, the baseball program I had for the CoCo represented the players as...stick figures. Sure different from the "not only are they supposed to look like the players look, they're supposed to *move* like the players move"

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I remember something similar, in the Galaxy program from my father's 286 (remember when computers had numbers, and 25 kilohertz was *fast* and 40 meg was never going to be full, and you stored everything on floppies, even if you had a hard drive?)

WYSIWYG was a long way away then.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

A popular joke at PU when I was there:

"What are you writing your thesis on?"

"Eaton's Corrasable Bond."

also

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I personally have seen someone drop the deck of punchcards (*punch. cards.*) containing their senior thesis.

Re: also

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

ACK!!!!!!

I assume they got everyone helping them?

Re: also

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I don't actually remember that part, but I think so.

Re: also

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't need to, if you used the last 8 columns for serial numbers. Just drop them in the sorter.

Punch-cards for the thesis? How...1956. You couldn't get a tape? Although, you were there 9 years before me, and the laser printers had just come in a year or two before I started, say, 1981 or 82.

The spool for the laser printers (attached to the mainframe) was prioritized by job size, so when April 15 approached, you had to expect your thesis to take 36 hours or so to print. Also, as some discovered, you could print a page or two at a time and, at the expense of a lot of wasted paper, rise to the top of the queue.

Re: also

[magid.livejournal.com]

Ouch!

I remember punch cards.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

*Giggle*

I remember that. Awful stuff, but it made life easier.

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Go down into Firebone sometime and read the old dissertations, say from the 1950s. You'll note that they often are typed on multiple typewriters, a few pages on this, a few pages on that. I think people were splitting up their typing and typing each others' theses, so as not to get too bored, and also to speed up producing the master copy (including carbons!). E.g. James Meriwether's thesis (on Faulkner - his son was in Colonial with me, so I looked it up). Did you do similar things with senior theses?

[sisyphus91.livejournal.com]

A year or two ago, my daughter and I were in my school's media center, which houses one of the two type writers left on our campus. My daughter pointed to it and said, "What's that?"

I realized that we have made a nearly complete transition for typewriters to computers.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Up until a couple of years ago, we had an old Selectric in our office. It was part of my job to type leases on it. No one else in my office had actually used one before.

Then it broke. Now the agents handwrite them.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

*Ten years ago* I pointed to an IBM Selectric and asked my daughter, then 7, what she thought that was.

"Um, some kind of printer?"

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

My parents got their first computer when I was 8 years old- well ahead of the curve.

But I learned to type on an electric typewriter.

I started typing things in elementary school- my handwriting was very poor, and very slow. They used to make you bring in the handwritten rough draft, and I swear the worst part was handwriting something that I had already typed.

This was the mid/late 80's.

I got to college in 94. You could use the typewriter or the computer, and I turned in a lot fo stuff printed off on my old dot matrix, where the pages wouldn't align right.

Now? I can email things to the professor. I can pull the file, format, and print multiple copies. I'm still getting used to the ease.

[thessaliad.livejournal.com]

In the school I go to, some professors accept *only* email attachments.

I remember when I typed my highschool thesis on a manual because we were too poor for an electric typewriter.