My first memories of writing go back to my nursery school in Cardiff, when I must have been about the same age as the children in the photo above.

Our teacher used chalk to write on the blackboard (a technology which lasted until, quite recently, the whiteboard came along), and we copied it down with our own piece of chalk on our own slates.  The advantage was that the slate lasted forever and the chalk could be wiped off as often as needed.

The next major step was to be allowed to write with ink.  For this you used a wooden pen, with a metal nib which clicked into the end and had to be replaced, for example, if you pushed down too hard and it bent or splayed apart.  The ink was poured into the inkwell (a china container set into an appropriately shaped space in the desk, as in the right of the photo), which was carefully topped up by a trusted child who had been appointed ‘ink monitor‘ for the week. 

We were allowed to use pencils for certain work, though ink was used in our main exercise books, where teachers - or our parents - could look back to see how we’d been getting on. 

By the time I was at secondary school in the early 1950s, ballpoint pens (known as ‘biros”) were around; but many teachers didn’t like them and expected us to use pens.

By then we had all moved on to fountain pens  (so farewell the ink monitor). And so it went on until I went to university in 1957, and bought my first typewriter, second-hand!

A massive Remington, it practically required two people to carry it; but it did me for my three years at Cambridge, and I never quite got over how authoritative any typewritten essay or article looked compared to anything produced by pen.  For some time I used two-coloured ribbons,  so that I could switch to red when I quoted something in French or German (and yes, it had extra keys for ‘e acutes’, ‘o umlauts’ and so on).

By 1969, when I went to Leeds to do an MA in Linguistics and English Language teaching, I had gone for something much lighter, the classic Olivetti Lettera 32.

This accompanied me to Algeria in 1974, and back again to Britain where I hung on to it for quite a while, even after I had access - at work - to an IBM Selectric with a magic new ingredient, a choice of golfballs! These offered a variety of type faces, so that - within seconds - you could click a new one in place, By making the golf balls interchangeable, the Selectric enabled different fonts, including italics, scientific notation and other languages, to be swapped in.

The next stage was half-way towards actual word-processing, where new typewriters had the ability to store a certain amount of text, for editing and correcting, before printing it out. As one article explains:

1. •In 1964 IBM brought out the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter), which combined the features of the Selectric with a magnetic tape drive. Magnetic tape was the first reusable storage medium for typed information. With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects. This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today.
   

I never used a typewriter of this sort, since I mostly kept to my trusty Olivetti until Amstrad starting bringing out real computers which didn’t fill a room and were aimed at the home user.  This is the Amstrad PPC640 ‘portable’, similar to the one I used for 3 or 4 years .

Many younger people will be aghast to discover that (most?) home computers at this time had no hard drive.  With the early Amstrads you had to insert a square ‘floppy disc’, called the ‘start of the day disc’, into the machine which contained the basic software to work the thing and enable you to save data onto other floppies for possible printing out.

And that covers the 40 years or so in which I went from writing on bits of Welsh slate to the time I actually owned my own computer. (And that’s not to mention the twenty-five years since, which has ended up with me writing this on an Apple laptop, while spending an increasing amount of time on a smaller, neater i-Pad).  If I were to live as long as my Mother, I’ve got another couple of decades ahead of me; and goodness knows what I’ll be using then!.

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A key moment for me was the Easter of 1995, when I was co-organising a one-day event devoted to pronunciation teaching, before the start of a conference in Long Beach, California. All the Americans I met had something called an ‘e-mail address’ on their business cards, and wondered why I didn’t.  Those days seem almost as remote as when my oldest mate, Julian, and I picked up our bits of chalk in that nursery school in Cardiff right at the end of the war.