Computer technology.....I don't think those words together even existed in my early life. I learned to type on a manual typewriter (actually it's not even called "typing" anymore...it's "keyboarding" now.) The typewriters we had in high school were huge and heavy. They required "ribbons" and every time you wanted to move from one line to the next, you had to push this huge silver bar on the top. When we were seniors in high school in the advanced business classes, we got the privilege of using the "IBM Correcting Selectric" typewriter. Those things were amazing! They were electric and they corrected on their own by pressing the back button, although most of the time they didn't have the correction cartridge in them so you were forced to revert to "White Out" or those little strips with powdery white stuff on the back.
We had a few computers at my school. They were "Apple II C's." I'm not sure what their real purpose was, but in those advanced business classes, we were taught how to write a program in "BASIC" where you wrote many, many lines of text on the screen and if you got everything just right, it would display some word on the screen...something like "hi" or something. I never got to see the word because I always had too many typo's in my program. It wasn't very rewarding.
I took a class called "shorthand" in school, although I was never very good at it. Shorthand was a class where you learned to write things in shortened form. The purpose of the class was so that you could learn to take less time writing things so that you could go into your males boss's office wearing your short skirt while taking him coffee and take notes on the letter he dictates to you then go back to your desk and type the letter in duplicate or triplicate using carbon paper before you went out to pick up his dry cleaning, his lunch, his wife's birthday present and some flowers for his lover.
We played video games on the "Atari." I had a "Bee Gees" record player and 8 track tapes. I was in high school before we got cable tv or a microwave. I was 30 years old when I got my first cell phone. My older 2 children both got a cell phone at 10. I look at my children now and everything they can do related to technology. They are not scared or intimidated by it at all and they can usually figure out anything they need to know faster than I can. I think this is true of all kids growing up now.
Thinking back, people the age of my grandparents have basically no technology skills or aptitude for technology. That's the reason they sell those cell phones called "jitterbugs" on the late night tv commercials. If you've never seen one, a jitterbug is a cell phone with really large buttons that will only make calls.
People in my mom's generation for the most part can embrace technology and can learn to do things but for the most part, they seem intimidated by it a little. People in my generation are somewhere in between. We learn things more quickly and some have a great aptitude for technology that has been learned somewhere besides school...self taught or learning through trial and error. I am somewhat intimidated by technology although I generally find that I know more than I think I know.
