Monday, March 2, 2020

I'm 71 and 90% of the time I don't write in cursive: Why?

My parents forced me to be a right hander. I might have been somewhat ambidextrous but I still favored my left hand. But, because they were religious I wasn't "allowed" to be a left hander like Obama and McCain.

As a result since my father won a penmanship award as the best handwriting in Washington state he was really angry I didn't have good cursive too. And so at 8 or 9 I cried when my father yelled at me because my cursive wasn't very good. So, I realized my writing was much better when I printed the letters. To this day when I took notes in 5th grade onward I printed all my words because it looked much better and was more legible than cursive. I don't regret this decision especially in college where I could read my notes much better in hand printing than cursive anyway and I got really fast hand printing all the letters. So, I continue printing whenever writing anything down.

Once in a while on a Valentines Day Card or Christmas Card I will take the time to do cursive. But, I only do it for special occasions. However, sometimes when I write something I like a lot I might hand write it in cursive.

For example, most of the first part of Arcane in the "Memories" series was done first draft in cursive or hand written in hand printing. After a while I started more using a typewriter in order to get out information faster. Then when home computers started I could write and correct before I printed anything with my first epson printer in 1987. So, this was a big step forward being able to type before you printed something and correcting all the typing problems before you actually printed it out before on a typewriter.

Now with SIRI people likely will just speak into something and have SIRI print it out or Dragon Naturally speaking or something like that today.

I started writing Arcane about 1980 but I don't think the first IBM home computer came out until 1981.

Here it is:

Search Results

IBM Personal Computer
IBM Model 5150
IBM introduces its Personal Computer (PC)
The first IBM PC, formally known as the IBM Model 5150, was based on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system. The IBM PC revolutionized business computing by becoming the first PC to gain widespread adoption by industry.

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