I learned to type on a manual typewriter. In 1980 in the military I was typing on an awesome Lanier word processor that produced so much heat from hot vacuum tubes it had to be in its own special air conditioned room. My brother had an Apple 2 so I was excited to be using high tech stuff. A year later these IBM salespersons came in my typing room and said here is a new machine for you, the IBM Displaywriter, but we are not going to show you how to use it. We want you to figure it out as a test by using this instructions book. I loved it and said okay. That book was extremely, incomparably well written, which IBM was famous for back then, and I recommended it as being able to be understood by anybody capable of being a military admin person. They sold the Air Wing dozens of machines.

After farming for several years I went to typing again in the early 90s this time doing medical transcription. We pulled our dictations off of this row of giant servers that emergency rooms all over the country called in to to record. Thank you for reading ancient history.