Relates to Activity 1 in Block 1 Part 2.
The first computer I remember using was an Amstrad computer that my father bought when he set up his own business in the late 1980s. It ran a word processing program called LocoScript, and had a daisy-wheel printer attached.
The clip of the screen shown on the Wikipedia entry on LocoScript here takes me back. To do things, e.g. create and edit files, you entered keyboard commands – e.g. ‘C’ for create a new document. There was no pointing and clicking with a mouse – you went up and down with the cursor. Also, the screen didn’t display what you typed in the way it would actually look, as they do now – you got the same green type on a black background whatever you did.
I was around 18 by the time I used my dad’s Amstrad. We never had a computer at home before that, though I know some people did have home computers earlier in the 1980s. At school, there was a computer room, but it wasn’t very accessible to most pupils. There was a computer club that another girl and I once went along to, but we felt sneered at by the computing enthusiasts there (all boys) and never went back. Thank God computers are much more accessible to everyone these days.
When I started work shortly after that as a secretary, I used a variety of word processing packages. Temping in the late 1980s/early 1990s meant having to learn a whole variety of packages depending on the job you went to – I used WordStar, WordPerfect and DisplayWrite 4, and probably others that I’ve forgotten. Whatever you think about Microsoft, the advent of Word must have made temping a whole lot easier!