1982 - Finishing a Dissertation

Punch cards. That was my first clue that computers existed. Early 1960s. My Aunt Dorothy would bring home from work old computer punch cards, and when we went to visit she would give my brother and me stacks of these cards to play with, draw on, make train tickets with, etc. I was writing on computer punch cards at age 8 or so. (Aunt Dorothy, a math whiz, was payroll supervisor for a large company in Cleveland, in an era when not many women held management positions.)

First real use of a computer: 1982. Age 28. I was in my first year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. I was doing revisions on my dissertation the old-fashioned way: typing, retyping, and RETYPING pages, chapters endlessly. Steve Hollander, a new colleague in the Department of English and Linguistics, said to me one day, Why don't you us my computer to finish your dissertation? Steve served as University Editor and in his work used a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 4 computer with, as I can dimly remember, a powerful 128K RAM. (Steve bought it himself.) I was hesitant at first: Would moving over to the computer save me time finishing the dissertation, or would it cost me time if I had to learn how to use it? Steve assured me that it would save me loads of time — and of course he was right. Generous soul that he was, Steve let me use his computer when he didn’t need it, during the work day, after hours, on weekends. He taught me how to load disks, access files, enter text, make formatting changes, print out pages, save and back up work, the whole deal. I typed in the entire dissertation (once!) and from that point made editorial changes and revisions over the course of several months, until I finished the thing in May of 1982. Thanks to Steve, I learned that computers were usable, not scary, and that they were great tools for writing.

In 1984 I bought my first computer, a TRS-80 Model 4P. I talk about this experience
in a 2003 Computers & Composition article, "Why Technology
Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter's Tale" (Volume 20, 375-394).

Jim