The World Before My Laptop

Woe is me!  My laptop is malfunctioning.  I spent an hour or more on the phone with the cable folk yesterday trying to resolve the problem.  That didn’t work.   A trip to the Apple Store will be the next step.  How can I manage without my laptop?  I’m wholly dependent on it.  I  do have an iPhone and an iPad, and they are both working okay (so far), but neither of these are adequate substitutes for my laptop.  Woe is me!

Once upon a time I lived in a world devoid of computers: desktops, laptops, iPhones, and tablets.   It really wasn’t that long ago, but long enough ago that I can barely remember it. Or maybe, I really don’t want to remember it.  It was a primitive time.  We wrote a lot by hand.  On paper.  Being left-handed, I remember having a hard time writing in “right-handed notebooks”.  I was somewhat relieved from that handwriting business when I learned how to type on a typewriter.  I could once type/write 60-some words a minute.  If I made a mistake I could raise the paper and erase the error, lower the paper and type in the correct word or letter.  Later on a “white out” liquid was available to make corrections.  It took longer to type a research paper without error than it did to do the research and to write the notes! 

It was a time of great innovation.  If one needed an extra copy when writing on the typewriter,  carbon paper and what was known as onion skin paper would do the trick.  If you made a mistake, it only took 3-5 minutes to erase each copy.  If more than a few copies were desired we used a mimeograph machine or a “ditto” machine. The mimeo used a messy black ink and the “ditto” (sometimes called the “spirit duplicator) used an alcohol-based fluid on which one could easily get a “high!”  Then came the Multilith or the Lithograph duplicating process.  Why, IBM even came out with an electric typewriter and later (way back in 1961) they developed the “Selectric”  with replaceable caps with different fonts.  What an amazing machine that was!

Back in the day there were no telephone answering machines, no GPS or Google maps (you had to know how to read a road map) and you had to change your telephone number every time you moved.  An address book was a physical thing, an actual notebook, in which you had to write the address by hand and update it in the same way.  There is so much more I could say about how things (from banking to buying) were done back then, but space does not allow it.

Believe me, this is a very limited overview of that primitive time. Some people suggest it was a better time than the present.  I disagree.  It was a world without a laptop.  I prefer to live in a better world with my laptop.