One of the themes that cropped up consistently between these articles is the barrier of complex user interfaces and hardware limitations in early word processing setups. It is difficult to imagine trying to compose a piece of writing on a screen that can only handle a few lines of text at a time—and I’ve grown up with computers my entire life. Compounding the difficulty of merely seeing what you want to write, there seemed to be a huge barrier to entry in learning keyboard shortcuts and functions to make the word processor copy, paste, format paragraphs, etc. I have a hard enough time teaching my mother how to Ctrl+C to copy, let alone trying to teach a whole class a suite of shortcuts that they’ll need to rearrange the texts they have produced.

The Moran piece “Using What We Have” was fascinating, both in terms of seeing early collaborative writing exercises being explained and in how completely alien some of these programs/procedures sounded in relation to my computing experience. I have no idea what Interchange is and the naming conventions that he was using for his file directories were a bit foreign to me as well. I can’t imagine having read this at the time of its original publication. I can’t imagine reading this as a teacher with little or no computer experience because the article was written in a way that presumed a pretty sophisticated level of knowledge.