In high school, and when I started college, we typed everything.
I remember a lot of literal cut-and-paste work. I'd make a copy of my pasted together final draft on the best Xerox machine available so I wouldn't be turning in a document that would fall apart as someone was reading it. Some people with more resources than I had would hire someone to retype their papers.
My mom forced me and my siblings take typing in middle school and she expected us to type our own school work. She bought us our own typewriters when we went off to college.
Then I started writing on a computer terminal using vi. Magic.
After vi all was chaos, with too many competing word processors and computer operating systems. That's how I fell in love with plain text files. Those worked on any respectable computer that hosted a simple text editor.
Now I use Markdown for all my writing. It's easily converted to other document formats and works on any computer text editor.
I've always fancied myself a writer. Alas, I now figure some kind of innate language processing difficulty has always gotten in the way, which explains all the speech therapy I had as a kid and my later difficulties with my university English department, who only granted me my minor with great reluctance, and only because of my persistence.
My true inner voice doesn't speak English. All the other voices in my head do speak English. When I'm in a bad place, off my meds or my meds off me, the voices will become actual hallucinations. Most of these voices are not nice so I ignore all of them them for the sake of my sanity and well being.
Aside from all that, my mom used to be a world-class typist and she sometimes worked as a ghost writer. She could take cardboard boxes full of crap -- scribbled notes, ephemera, cassette tape ramblings, recollections, and interviews -- and turn it all into a polished manuscript ready for the publisher using little more than her favorite pens, stacks of yellow legal pads, and her IBM electric typewriter.
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