I’m sitting in bed with twenty minutes left to get my jotting done before today changes to tomorrow. I have a glass of wine by my side and the world at my very fingertips and I’m kind of marveling, as I sometimes do, at how much the world has changed since I learned to type.
I started on my mother’s 80lb cast iron Underwood. I remember being determined to learn to touchtype even as my fingers missed the keys (which had to be punched as hard as I could muster) and got jammed painfully between them and the hammers (is that what they were called?) got stuck together whenever I hit two keys too close together and the bell dinged when I reached the end of the line. My idea of a computer was the monster at my school which took up an entire room and ate punch cards by the hundreds every minute.
And how many years later? Thirty five very short ones when you consider how long the earth has been around – I’m sitting in bed with a computer on my lap, a tablet and a phone by my side which are all capable of reaching almost any given place on the planet in an instant. Think about it. Seriously, think about it.
Ten minutes to go.
An instant.
This post is part of Just Jot It January. Join in today! https://lindaghill.com/2015/01/01/just-jot-it-january-pingback-post-and-rules/


January 11, 2015 at 3:26 pm
Humanity gets a few things right here and there…
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January 11, 2015 at 10:16 pm
Thank goodness… 🙂
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January 10, 2015 at 11:38 pm
The Jesuits taught all of us to type in Freshman year so that all subsequent papers would be typed and they wouldn’t have to figure out our handwriting.
I realized today that I took my first computer science class forty years ago this month.
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January 11, 2015 at 10:18 pm
Not quite the same thing they’re teaching nowadays, eh? Hehehe.
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January 10, 2015 at 11:57 am
Yes it is amazing Linda, I have been on this planet over 60yrs and woo how things have progress since at the age of 3yrs a pen was put in my hand … the though of it all makes me dizzy! 🙂 xxxxxxx
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January 17, 2015 at 12:11 pm
I know what you mean!
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January 10, 2015 at 11:31 am
I’m a self taught typist (from a teach-yourself-to-type book) on my very much-loved typewriter with ribbons that had to be changed when the ink faded. Then I moved up to an electric one with a digital display! Woot! Okay thanks, now I’m feeling ancient.
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January 10, 2015 at 11:50 am
Haha! Yeah, I know what you mean. My mother, a typist herself, was convinced that I needed to learn in order to survive and in a way she was right. When everyone thought speech to text would be the only way of the future it turns out that it’s only part of the picture… so far.
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January 10, 2015 at 10:04 am
It is interesting….to us anyway. I do wonder sometimes what sort of “progress” our own children will see in their lifetimes. It seems impossible to imagine!
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January 10, 2015 at 11:44 am
It really is impossible to imagine, though there were instances of “seers” getting our technology right before it came into existence. Makes you wonder indeed. 🙂
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January 10, 2015 at 8:12 am
Imagine what you would have had to do to try and share something with hundreds of people around the globe 35 years ago. I remember trying to type on a a typewriter like that. I also remember getting a portable typewriter to take to college and thinking how wonderful it was to be able to take that 10lb lightweight with me.
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January 10, 2015 at 11:40 am
35 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have been sharing a picture of myself seconds after I’d taken it. 😛 Haha! I remember my first portable typewriter too – now one pound is too much for us to carry. 😛
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January 10, 2015 at 4:11 am
I so do remember the underwood with all keys painted to hide the letters so we would learn to touch type properly without cheating! and going through half my degree typing on my modern IBM selectric that I had to change balls each time I wanted to change font! we have come a long way…including dial up was the only choice at first…beep beep beep…then sounds like ET was coming through the lines:)
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January 10, 2015 at 11:34 am
Wasn’t the Selectric just the best thing ever? Haha! The keyboards in my high school typing class were all blank, so there was no cheating. 🙂 And yeah, I don’t miss the dial up noise, nor getting kicked off the internet by a phone call. 😛 Ah, memory lane, eh?
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January 10, 2015 at 3:54 pm
At bs college we were told if you’re lucky you’ll get to work on a selectric…haha…took 5 years. I still like those small manual portables..;I remember when I lived in TO I had a call display feature added to the computer so I knew who was calling and could just click no response and call them later.
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January 17, 2015 at 12:12 pm
That’s impressive. 🙂
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January 10, 2015 at 3:46 am
Oh my gosh. You had somehow gotten dropped from my follow list!
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January 10, 2015 at 11:26 am
That’s happened to me before. You don’t realise it until you start wondering where someone went all of a sudden. 😛 Glad you’re back!
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January 10, 2015 at 1:41 am
I just completed my SoCS post mentioning almost the same thing 🙂
My friends tell me that I still type on my laptop as if I am typing on a typewriter, hitting every key very hard and making a cacophony when I type fast. Guess I haven’t forgotten much 😉 And I do remember my first mobile phone, hard as a brick and almost looking like a walkie talkie…now all we need is a ‘watch’ to connect !
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January 10, 2015 at 11:24 am
Ha! When I was in Japan my cell phone couldn’t pick up a signal. It became my clock and nothing else.
Your keypads must love you. Haha!
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January 10, 2015 at 12:52 am
The kids and I talk about this often. I’m glad you have a computer on your lap, and that I’ve got one on mine, too. And tablets get my inner Trekkie all happy. Like data PADDs, they are! =D
This was a lovely quick jotting!
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January 10, 2015 at 11:23 am
Thanks, Shan. It’s an interesting topic. 🙂
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January 10, 2015 at 12:30 am
It’s amazing when you think about all that has changed in 35 years and then try to imagine 35 years from now and how things will have changed by then, assuming the human race is still around. I know I won’t be still around 35 years from now.
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January 10, 2015 at 11:22 am
Never know… maybe they’ll invent immortality by then. 😉
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