When I went to college, I had a manual typewriter. I think it was our family Royal typewriter. At some point in college my parents purchased for me an Adler electric typewriter. Then while in seminary I got an IBM Selectric. During our two years in England during PhD studies, I typed mostly on a tiny manual portable typewriter, and the letter “Q” stuck and that was no small problem for me. Only in my second year of professoring did we get a computer, a Mac 512K. Remember those days? What happened?I cropped a picture of a Royal and this is about what we had, but ours was either black or dark green:manual.jpgI’ll tell you what happened. To quote ABBA, “it’s a Mac man’s world!” (I adjusted that line.) Today our college students all seem to have a laptop. Amazon sent me this information the other day and I wondered this: What are parents doing today about computers and laptops when they send their kids off to college?When Laura went to Wheaton, she had an old hand-me-down Mac with a little thing called a trac-ball. When Luke went to Kansas, he took our Gateway (and we got a new one). Both of them today use Apple; wise kids they are.

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