Musings on Technology and Learning Disabilities on the Occasion of the New Millennium

Abstract

Almost 30 years ago, I bought an IBM Selectric typewriter for about $500. I still use it occasionally and it works perfectly. Almost 20 years ago, I bought my first home microcomputer, an Apple II Plus, for about $5,000. The system included a monochrome Zenith monitor with an amber display, an Apple disk drive, and an Epson dot matrix printer, all state-of-the-art equipment. It also included a shift key modification so that both upper and lowercase letters would appear on the screen. The BASIC programming language was resident in ROM. I had to purchase software to run on the microcomputer, and my first purchase was the Apple Writer II word processor. This computer system is gone from my life; it's too old even to be stored with the “antiques” in the rafters of my garage.