by sandy Penny, 2013
Fortunately for me, I was on the edge of the typing revolution, and my second job out of school offered me a whole new beautiful world. I had to talk them into hiring me because my typing score was so low, but I wanted that job, and even then I could be very persuasive. I worked for a travel agency, creating custom tour packets for the rich and famous. I learned to use an IBM Composer, one of the word processors where you could correct mistakes via a tiny single-line display on the front of the typewriter. I was so happy not to have to deal with carbon paper that I worked hard to become a very fast typist. 
And the keys were so easy to press, unlike the Royal monster. In no time, my typing speed had doubled, which was important in those days. They measured your typing speed by having you type repeatedly, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which uses the entire alphabet. The composer used these funny little round fonts. Each little ball was a different type style and twisted round and up and down to find the letters.I didn't know at first that this was the first desktop publishing equipment, cold type, as it was known back then. After typing the text and proofing it, you would run it through a wax machine, paste it on a layout board on a light table, align it with a T-square, and that would be photographed and turned into a printing plate. Wow, what an intricate process it all seems now, but it led me to my career as a graphic designer in the early days when you didn't need a degree to be hired, just talent, precision and the ability to type well. You learned everything on the job back then, mainly because there were no schools that taught graphic design at that point. It was a frontier field, and I got to be part of it.
Then came the PC. The first PCs came with almost no programming and few software programs available. You had to type in your own programming at first. And, it would not work if you made a typo. You had to be a very good proofreader to find errors and correct them so your program would run properly. We had 1 meg of ram and 8 megs of memory and a floppy disk to save about 30 pages at a time. Jump forward just a few years, and software was coming out as fast as apps are now. We made major leaps in a very short time. Everything was changing at a rapid pace.
And, then the first digital graphic design program arrived on the scene, Adobe PageMaker. Desktop publishing was off and running. It was WYSIWIG, a new term at the time, what you see is what you get. Before WYSIWIG, you saw lines of code and had to print it out to see if it looked right. If not, back to the electronic drawing board. Graphic designers had been consulted, and all the features used in traditional design were incorporated into the program, but it all happened in your computer. No more waxing and pasting and aligning. Hallelujah. I was so thrilled, that even though I didn't have one of my own, I rented time on a computer at Kinko's copy centers, bought a tutorial book, and taught myself to use it. I could see it was the wave of the future, and I wanted to ride that wave. To me, it still is a fantastic program, and I miss now that they have phased it out, but nothing I have currently seen lives up to its high standards, drag and drop ease of use, and user friendly features.
With or without my permission, change continued to gallop along, and then we added jet fuel to the mix ... the Internet. The promise of the internet was huge. Sure you had to dial up with your phone and deal with getting knocked offline regularly, but it was the new frontier, and we dealt with it. There wasn't much there at first, but it was growing exponentially. What has happened in the last 20 years is phenomenal. The first social media was AOL, with email and online chat rooms, and the first online classrooms, and for the more tech minded, there was CompuServe. Back then, we had to pay per minute online, and people got themselves into financial trouble. I had a friend who ran up an $800 bill in one month. But it was the harbinger of our current social media. At the same time as the internet became popular, FedEx got a handle on international shipping, and that was all it took to get businesses to take notice of the worldwide marketplace at their fingertips.
Well, the rest is history, as they say, and I have made my living typing, contrary to my Royal pain at the beginning. I have embraced change, and I still do, although I am more selective and slower to integrate new technologies while they beta test and work out the bugs now. I have been a pioneer all along the way, and now I am happy to pass the torch to younger, more energetic pioneers. May your journey be as interesting as mine has been.
