When I graduated from Hale High School in 1972, my brother Ben gave me a reconditioned Underwood typewriter as a graduation gift.

While at Hale, I took one semester of typing (and one semester of drivers’ education). I actually got to be a good typist. I could do 40 words a minute with few errors.

I took that Underwood typewriter to college with me and it served me well.

My first job was as a sports reporter for the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, a daily paper in Bartlesville. We wrote our stories on typewriters. After editing, we pasted all the pages together and gave them to one of our typesetters. They retyped them on a crude machine that produced a narrow yellow tape with holes punched in it to indicate type. Then the text was set, trimmed and waxed and pasted on a pasteup sheet which was sent to the printers.

It was a slow and messy process.

My second job as managing editor of the Bixby Bulletin was the same sort of setup.

When I was hired by the daily paper in 1978, I started using a computer to write my stories. It was crude but it was much easier than a typewriter.

The biggest problem was that the computer maintain routinely went down and if you had not saved your text, it was lost and you had to start all over. You learned to type a few paragraphs, save the text, and then write some more.

When Susan and I started the Glenpool Post in 1984, we bought a reconditioned Compugraphic Editwriter. It was a computer combined with a photographic typesetter.

I would write a story and then it would produce a strip of photographic paper that then was developed in a machine that developed the text.

There were a few problems.

First, the computer had no memory so you couldn’t save any stories.

Secondly, the photographic paper was expensive and cleaning the developing unit was messy.

I bought my first personal computer in 1988. It was basically a word processor but it did have limited memory so I could save text. It was very easy to use.

Later, I started using a MacIntosh for graphics but I didn’t buy one because it was too expensive.

Instead, I rented time on the Macs at Kinko’s. That was inconvenient but it was very useful.

Old-time newspaper people kept telling me that MacIntoshes were “toys” you couldn’t put out a paper with them. I disagreed.

When we started the Tulsa Beacon in 2001, we bought a Mac for me to use to write on and to design the paper. Since then, we have gone through four or five Macs and each one is more complicated but more useful.

Every Tuesday, I take the 16 pages of the Tulsa Beacon and create PDFs (portable document format) and I send them via a program called Fetch to our printer in Muskogee.

Then it’s just one step to make the plates that are used to print the paper. I send the PDFs around noon and we get the papers back in the early evening on Tuesday.

The printing itself has not changed that much. But what has changed is how I gather the news.

I have two email addresses and people send me press releases. I download them, edit them and decide if they should go in the paper and where. I get some high quality photographs by email, too.

When I research stories, I can go government or business websites and download press releases or photos. I have access to a number of news websites that are good sources of information.

It is very efficient, which is important because one person can do the work of several people thanks to the Internet and computers. We really couldn’t afford to hire three or four writers.

My decades old typing skills serve me well. Do they even teach typing anymore? Most of the young adults I see at computers use one finger to hunt and peck out text – like they would on their cell phones. Typing seems to be a lost art.

My computer auto-corrects my typing, which is mostly good but sometimes annoying. The Quark-Express program that I use to design the paper has a universal spell-check option that I use on every document. It’s a big help but it doesn’t catch everything.

Technology is racing. I probably should buy a new computer at least every three years and update some of the programs that I use constantly. Computer software and hardware is a racket. They want to force you to update certain programs or they become unusable.

I don’t miss typewriters. I don’t think I could produce a newspaper with them now.

But that old reconditioned Underwood typewriter sure came in handy 50 years ago.