We've Come a Long Way by Nancy L. Eady

      It has been many moons since I had a real summer vacation, the kind that starts when school gets out in May and ends when school starts again in August. (In other states, I realize those dates work as June through September, but in Alabama it's May and August.) I still remember the summer before my senior year as one of the best. I spent six weeks that long ago summer in the 1980s at an electric typewriter from 8 until 5 Monday through Friday, banging out the draft of what evolved into a weird, fractured fairy tale about three bears named Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. I know it was weird because my mother’s only comment  after reading it was, “That was different.”

          Do I still have the manuscript? Of course. I haven’t read it since that summer, but I have many forgettable manuscripts tucked away in a secret corner of my closet (in that last moving box that never quite gets unpacked when you move) because even though they’re pretty much garbage, I just don’t have the heart to part with them. The collection also includes poetry from my junior and senior high school years that I wrote during the “I walk alone” stage many teens suffer through.

          Thinking about that hidden collection reminds me how much the world around me has changed since then. That long ago summer, when I was banging away at the electric typewriter, computers were things that those of us in advanced classes learned how to program using simple DOS commands [DOS was one of the earliest programming languages] with a connection to a main frame computer at a local college. If you could write a program that would alphabetize a simple list of first names, you accomplished something!

          The idea of using a computer as an extremely intelligent typewriter was nothing more than a gleam in the eyes of a few visionaries out west and in the high-tech departments of a few universities. Electronic books such as Kindles or Nooks existed only in science fiction.  My owning a library of hundreds of books one day was unthinkable unless I intended to be a neurosurgeon, to marry extremely well or to stumble into an unexpected source of wealth. Even had I access to wealth (which I didn’t), spending such wealth was only possible if I had cash or a check from a bank account. ATMs didn’t exist, either.

          It was also a good thing my writing that summer required no research. Because the internet had yet to be imagined, let alone implemented, research meant you had to stop writing to travel to the library and hope that it had the information you sought. That is a far cry from today’s world, where I get highly irate if I can’t find the answer to almost any question I can conceive of through Google.

          Telephones remained firmly attached to walls by cords, and lucky indeed was the teenager who either had her own telephone line in her own room or a cord long enough to pull the kitchen phone into another room for a little privacy.  Except for a very privileged few individuals who had access to cable, television was limited to what was playing on the three major networks: ABC, CBS and NBC, and the public television station, PBS. Larger cities would have one or two independent stations also, but not Montgomery, Alabama.

          As people get older, they tend to wax nostalgic about “the good old days.” I miss some things from those days (i.e., the long summer vacation), but as far as my writing and research tools are concerned, I am grateful for progress.

          What is your favorite “modern” writing tool? What is your least favorite? Is there any tool you regard as a necessary evil?