I liked the years between when personal computers became available, and when the internet arrived to the public. You purchased a computer and you chose some software packages - an encyclopedia, maybe. Your favorite games. Accounting and geneaology and learn-to-speak-Italian. Word processing and art software. There was no connection to other computers. It was like having a private notebook that held a closet of books and pens and ink and writing paper and fun things to do, all in one cube on your desk.

With the arrival of internet, we started off with exchanging emails (this was before texting on cellphones showed up) and then, as websites mutiplied exponentially, we started surfing. Via the internet, we visited fun places we might never have known of, met people and their thoughts and the photos of where they lived and what they liked to do,  and had access to great sources of information. The internet has been a life-expanding experience, something big formerly unknown to mankind.

However, there has been a kind of rise and fall with the internet. The connections to other computers and databanks at other locations has led to intentional mischief that in some ways has undermined not only the internet, our security, and our computers, but the foundation of our culture.

Well, that's debatable and I'm meandering. What I wanted to write about was before computers. The assignments and papers we handed in when I was in high school were written by hand (or, rarely, typed on a typewriter). There was a certain format that was expected - where you placed your name, the date, and the class title, for example. By college, you were expected to have access to a typewriter, or a typist. We were familiar with white-out, correction tape, and erasable bond typing paper. There were all kinds of rules, many now lost, in the mechanics of typing. For example, the tradition at that time was to type a single space between words, and a double space to separate sentences. There were expectations about whether the text should be double- or single-spaced. A dash consisted of two hyphens, and we were expected to know the difference between the use of a dash and a hyphen. Finally, in typing manuscripts for publication (I don't know why I love writing about these things), you ended the text you submitted with three hash marks, ###, perfectly centered below the last sentence, marking the end.