Wandermansnipbest1

Richard Wanderman I mean we could start the story in a lot of different places but I…because I have a learning disability, that’s been a major influence on the kinds of things that I’ve been interested in and done for myself—either avoiding things or looking for things to help me with the learning disability. And one thing I got very interested in at Oregon was fine arts. So I have an MFA in fine arts and I spent a lot of years teaching and being a practicing artist and got comfortable in that area. But during that time I never really dealt with the learning disability piece of my life which had been …not isolated but compartmentalized and sort of thrown under the rug. And there came a time—it was actually when I was living in Los Angles—but I went back to Oregon so that the Los Angeles experience sort of threw me into another…a problem with my life so that I decided I was going to throw a lot of things on the table that I had avoided. And so when I came back to Oregon from Los Angeles I decided I was going to get to the bottom of the learning disabilities thing. And so this is pre-computers—I think the Apple I had been invented but I didn’t know about it yet and certainly wasn’t in the position to find out about it, but I got myself a typewriter and started writing with the typewriter and saw right away that this piece of technology eliminated the handwriting problem for me and that was a revelation. That may be the most important revelation in all of this because had I not seen that, I never would have seen that…I never would have been able to make a separation between handwriting and my literacy issues. And so once that was solved and I started typing, it effectively, effectively compared to what touch typing does on a computer keyboard, solved a large enough piece of my problems that I actually saw that I could become literate someday if I worked at it. So I did a lot of writing. I knew from my experience as an artist that if I did something a lot, I could get better at it. So I never had a tool that enabled me to do that with writing but now that I had a typewriter I did that. So for two years I did that, and at the end of the two years a friend introduced me to a computer, and it was a…it was an early IBM PC. No hard disk; it wasn’t an AT—if I remember the AT was the one with the hard disk that came later. It was a 2-disk drive PC. And I went out and got that computer very, very quickly and then also other computers. And I didn’t have a lot of money to do this but I thought that it would be important and so I started getting into computing and during that first couple of years I had Apple IIs, K Pros, IBM PCs running CPM 86 and MS DOS. MS DOS hadn’t quite won yet. Just…because I wasn’t quite sure which of these was going to be the easiest to use and because I had read in the process of making this transition, an interesting book that was also important in turning me on to what the possibilities were. And the book was The Word Processing Book by a guy named Peter McWilliams. I don’t know whether you remember that book; probably very few people in our area—he wrote a book on computers and disabilities but I don’t think it was as popular. The Word Processing Book explained in very simple terms what writing on a computer could do for the writing process. And once I experienced that I knew he was right and so during that time I got pretty deeply, as deeply as I could get, into this computing area and decided that what I wanted to do was document my experience, as a person with a learning disability, using technology.