[jillesvangurp]

I somehow memorized most of the function key combos for wordperfect when in high school. And it wasn't like I was doing loads of reports for school. I guess it was a combination of there not being much else to do with the PC I had than playing the few (copied) games I had and fiddling with my copy of Wordperfect 5.1 (my neighbor who taught using it, supplied it). In any case, bored as I was, I explored a lot of the feature set and wrapped my head around features I would never use. Like creating mailings. I don't think I've ever actually had to create one. But it was there so I dove into it. For the post-internet generation, this is how you would create snail mail spam campaign in the early nineties. Merge a list of addressees with a letter with the right codes and then print personalized letters.

I also had a hand me down commodore 64 before that. My uncle donated this when he got his first PC. I taught myself basic on that. And with a few peeks and pokes managed a simple game even. Alas, I had no disk drive and never thought to actually save my creations anywhere. Like on the tape drive I did have. The commodore 64 was great though. And my uncle bundled some introductory computer science stuff with it (a primer on bits and bytes) that along with the excellent C64 manual went a long way to got me into programming. My local library was useless. I had no access to information. There was no internet (at least not accessible to me; I had not even heard of it). But that C64 manual got me curious and I had nothing better to do. I did not realize it at the time but that bit of commodore 64 documentation and computer science intro is what changed my life.

The PC I got after that was relatively boring because it did not include anything useful in terms of documentation. Starved of information, I dove into Wordperfect.

[tombert]

I probably would have done my homework on the C64 in the late 90's, where doing something like that on the C64 would still kind of be a viable thing (barely), but my dad didn't have the printer for it anymore. My parents had a computer and I did use it but mostly to play Descent.

Once I got my own computer I started doing everything on it, primarily because teachers genuinely could not read my handwriting. This sometimes required me to retype the worksheets in some capacity, but fortunately my teachers never had a problem with me doing that (maybe because they knew the alternative would be an unreadable mess). I learned algebra and calculus via the use of MathType (which Florida's online school gave a free license and I took one class virtually), and it's to a point now where I can almost never find a pen when I need one because I type everything out, since I haven't really practiced writing with by hand for about twenty years. I genuinely get kind of uncomfortable doing any kind of math with pen and paper now, since I'm so used to MathType and now LaTeX.

I never did a depth-first analysis of the features of WordPerfect, just the superficial stuff to make basic documents, but I did like using it. I don't remember any of the keystrokes anymore, but I did learn them when I was first using it.

[igneo676]

My highschool teacher in 2008 taught us how to use the "mail merge" feature in Word. Out of the whole class it was the most "advanced" feature we learned and I wondered if I would ever use it in reality. Nope. Good to know it was outdated in the 90s