Comment by jwitchel
9 hours ago
I knew a guy early in my career who has a secretary (for starters!) who printed out his email and put them on his desk every morning with the rest of the mail. He would then dictate his response to her and she would type it in. It was pure ego. Nothing else.
Some in that era could not type, at all.
And I've read somewhere that quite a fraction of young people nowadays can't type (effectively) on a physical keyboard - no wonder, their main interaction with computing being via phones and tablets. Could be that typing won't be useful/practiced anymore (like already cursive writing in some parts of the world).
There is a generation of people that are unique insofar as having grown up with handwriting on pen and paper (with cursive!) in school while also having typing/computing classes and access to the internet at a young age. Of course, people could type before computers, though it was a specialist skill more often than not, and kids certainly have every opportunity to pick up both handwriting and touch typing today, but the balance of it all isn't quite the same is it?
Yes, and because typists and secretaries were predominately women, it was not as uncommon as one might imagine for male executives to eschew personal computers based on their perception of gender roles.
I like to call it “keyboard cooties.”
I don't know why you're being downvoted, this is absolutely true.
I had a boss early in my career (around 1990) who considered typing effeminate and was mildly horrified at what the world was coming to with all us guys who were cheerfully using a keyboard. He had a secretary who did all his typing. This was ~5 years before email became common, but I'm sure he would have had all his emails printed so he could read them properly.
There's a great anecdote about that in the book _Dealers of Lightning_, where the Xerox execs were indifferent to a demo of the Star personal computer but their wives were ecstatic about it.
These things have a self-reinforcing feedback loop -- consider also for example, men learning to use "power tools" but not a sewing machine.
Isn't this still what Donald Trump does?
Yes, he doesn't really know how to use a computer. He was born in the 1940s, computer skills are not super common for people from that generation. He was already in his mid-50s when computers started to become common in the workplace.
I’m in my mid forties. If VR/ar devices like the Apple Vision Pro were to go mainstream, I can’t imagine myself learning how to use it effectively as a daily driver device to get work done. Heck, even the Internet, I’m pretty sure my relationship with it is more of wary scepticism than most people in their thirties.
I can see why someone who never used email until their fifties would never get fully comfortable with it.
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