My first job was as a reporter in Mexico City at an English language newspaper.

We would write our stories on manual typewriters. (Imagine the sound of 50 reporters banging away in one room!)

One benefit was that it forced you to visualize how you were going to order the paragraphs and structure each sentence in your head before typing it.

(If this were a movie it would be like the scene in Queen’s Gambit where she plays chess on the ceiling.)

After you had a draft, you would take it over to one of a small handful of computer terminals made by Harris Computer and enter in the text.

You would type HO (hola) on the command line and hit the enter key, which in Spanish was ENV MAND. When you finished, you had to type MANDO 8, which sounds like a Star Wars character.

The story printed out downstairs where it was given to the layout specialists who cut and paste the text on a page.

The last step was three people would read the copy for typos. If they found any, they would use an exacto knife to fix it by cutting and pasting letters.

I kept a copy of the instructions I was given to operate the system.

It looks like something from the Vietnam War era.