As a student in a 1970s high school computer lab, I used a teletypewriter to punch holes in a paper tape, dialed a phone number and jammed the handset into two rubber cups. Somehow, an unseen computer on the other end was told to do something. I didn’t see the point.
In the 1980s, as a newly minted account executive at a consulting firm, I assured a colleague I’d be dead long before any work I might do would require learning to use a computer. (I also was sure that I wouldn’t ever need to type — that’s what the secretaries outside my office did on electric typewriters, which corrected typos at the touch of key!)
