Sometimes, when I recall how quickly technology evolves, I feel old.

I am old enough to remember storing my files on 3 ½ -inch disks. I had to buy one in high school for my typing class. (Yes, I was of the first generation that learned to type on a computer instead of a typewriter.) The computers we used were IBM PS2s and the year that I used them, they were new to the school. This was 1989, so we were considered ahead of many other school districts in Maryland.

The following semester, I took a class called Computer Applications, where we worked on Apple IIe machines. Unfortunately, these dinosaurs did not work with the 3 ½- inch disk; instead, they worked with the ancient 5 ¼-inch floppy disks (the kind that, I assume, gave rise to the term “floppy”) and I had to purchase one. I only vaguely remember the primitive word processing program that we were taught to use.

I learned WordPerfect in high school when I was the copy editor of the school newspaper. I loved it. At that time, Windows was in its infancy and Microsoft Word had not yet come out, so WordPerfect was considered the best of the best (at least by me).

Imagine my shock, then, when I arrived as a freshman at my small liberal arts college and found that the computers in its lab did not have WordPerfect, but WordStar. WordStar was clunky and not user-friendly. I hated it and so did the other students. I believe that it was the following year when the college installed WordPerfect on its lab computers—probably by popular request.

It was around the time I graduated college that I began to experiment with the Microsoft Windows products. I basically taught myself MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint at first and took classes and read books later in life to constantly update and refine my skills with them. Nowadays, I am using the standalone version of MS Office 2019. I look back at WordPerfect and the other word processing programs of the past and wonder how I ever managed to write papers on them.

What are some of your computer-related memories?