When I was a kid in the early ’90s, laptops were insanely expensive and out of reach. Instead, I knew I had to have a Brother word processor. It was everything that I wanted.
My lust for a portable writing machine bordered on obsession. I wrote away for catalogues, then would cut out pictures and tape them around the house, hoping that my parents would get the hint the fifth time they were confronted at the bathroom mirror by a keyboard and grainy screen. I saved pet-sitting proceeds, birthday money, and volunteered for any sort of tasks that might earn a few dollars.
I hardly made a dent — I was 10 — but I must’ve impressed my parents with my industriousness. One glorious day I came home to the Brother WP-1400D, a beautiful hulking processor with a clicky keyboard, wide screen, and disk drive. While not easily portable, I insisted on taking it with me everywhere. My parents let me use the money I’d saved to buy my second-most-desired tech: the Creepy Crawlers oven, wherein one could bake up all kinds of strange gooey creatures.
That word processor is in a closet at my mum’s house — I couldn’t imagine getting rid of it even after all these years. Maybe I should retrieve it, see if it still works, and revisit a time when the technology of writing seemed like magic, and there was no Internet for distraction. We had some good years together.
What tech did you absolutely have to have, to the point where you started saving up for it?
Images via Wikimedia Commons