Writing Tools and the March of Technology

I bought my first computer thirty years ago, a Kaypro II. It was state of the art for the personal computer: no hard drive, of course, but duel floppy drives so you could run software on one and save your work on the other.

The operating system was CP/M. I picked the Kaypro because I’d read that the CP/M operating system was the one most likely to survive. Microsoft was still an upstart back then.

It was “portable,” meaning that it closed up into something about the size of a sewing machine and...