is people who learned how to enter text using Graffiti on their Palm devices forgetting how to write normal english orthography.
I remember reading reports of this, but basically the Palm died off before it could become a real issue, and subsequent attempts at pen-based data entry have I think focused on simply recognizing real handwriting as opposed to training people to produce more computer-friendly characters.
(This never happened to me, but I would certainly have been a candidate for it, I wrote a lot on the Palm Pilot I inexplicably owned in high school.1)
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I got a stipend for participating in some sort of stupid youth program and I used it to buy a Palm Pilot from Best Buy. This was many years before I would actually be able to buy something like a computer of my own (that wasn't second or third hand). I got the extended warranty for some reason and lucked out because not only did my device eventually break and get replaced, they upgraded me like two product versions in the process. I used it to read a ton of books from Project Gutenberg and also wrote quite a lot of fiction on it.
I loved computers conceptually, but had quite limited exposure to them, especially ones which were connected to the internet. Like, sometimes I would go to the library and browse gopher on the catalog terminals, just cause. I wonder how many people in the Oakland library system even knew that was on there. I didn't really have a use case, but the idea of it was cool.
I never really had the opportunity to use things like MUDs, but again I loved the idea of them. I literally checked a book about them out of the library and then in lieu of an English paper I made a bot version of beloved Kurt Vonnegut character Kilogre Trout1 that just wandered around some abandoned MOO (that I think was set up as like a virtual conference center for academics?) and emitted quotes from Breakfast of Champions.
I was truly a nerd starved for nerd shit.
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Which for a long time Vonnegut apparently denied was a parody of superior science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, which is hilarious.



