City Living  The first word processor

Mrs. Morgan: Good. So change the first part and make those corrections and your paper will be great.

Tara: Ok. Thanks for all your help, Professor Morgan. I'll email my paper to you later today.

Mrs. Morgan: You know technology is amazing. In high school I used to write my papers on a typewriter.

Tara: It must have taken a long time to write a paper on a  typewriter.

Mrs. Morgan: Well, I was pretty fast, but I hade some mistakes. Actually the typewriters weren’t that bad. Now as for the first computer… oh my gosh!

Tara: What do you mean?

Mrs. Morgan: The first computers were so unreliable. They used to crash all the time. And they were not as affordable or as fast as they are now.

Tara: Mine's pretty fast, but not as fast as some of the newer, more expensive ones.

Mrs. Morgan: I know! And nowadays, almost everyone has a computer. In those days, nobody had their own computer. We had to use the ones at the university.

Tara: In the computer lab?

Mrs. Morgan: Yeah, that's all we had. I'll never forget, one spring, during final exams. Everybody was working on their term papers, and the electricity went out!

Tara: So? No big deal… laptops have batteries…

Mrs. Morgan: Yes, but remember, in those days we didn't have laptops. If your computer crashed, you lost everything.

Tara: Everything?

Mrs. Morgan: Everything. We used to lose information all the time, but that time it was terrible. Everybody lost their paper that afternoon… including me.

Tara: What did you do?

Mrs. Morgan: I went back to the good, old-fashioned way

Tara: You mean typewriter?

Mrs. Morgan: Nope. I used something more affordable, portable, reliable, disposable, something that always worked.

Tara: What was that?

Mrs. Morgan: The first word processor.