Well, it was only a few years back I left high school, and my last English teacher had a big "no word processor" rule on homework, to prevent spell check cheating. I immediately put up a hand and asked about using a typewriter. A bit surprised, he said it was okay. So, a large portion of my essays were typewritten on a 1940s Smith-corona (still have that awesome typewriter...).
Not too much later in that year, I convinced him to allow my laptop, a Tandy model 102 with 32K storage! It was an easy sell, as he understood that if I installed a spellchecker the dictionary file would use the entirety of the computer storage. So, all of my notes in English (and history) were all typewritten on the Tandy. When the work was complete, I printed to an old Canon bubblejet and saved a backup copy on the AA-powered tandy portable disk drive (400K in 2 banks on a custom format 3.5" floppy).
Maybe it was a sign of things to come with I was in grade 8 using a slide rule when I had forgotten my calculator...
Still, looking back, the 4 seconds it took to go from off to "ready to work" was pretty awesome (the 20 hour battery life didn't hurt either). Too bad we didn't have those specs on the average notebook now!
