Re: Foot pedal
In the early days of PCs making it into industry where I worked, ONLY the secretaries had them (and a few the technical departments). God, you wouldn't believe how hard it was to justify one if you weren't a secretary.
As a youngster - and with many of the secretaries also being young - I assumed (this was early 90s thinking, you realise) that they 'understood' computers since they were using them all day every day. At the time, they typed up all memos and reports using the old DOS-based WordPerfect (5.2, if I remember).
Time passed. Not much time, since things were moving apace back then, but enough for the company I was with to move to a Windows-based version of WordPerfect (6.0a).
All hell broke loose. The secretaries were in tears, and couldn't use it. It was chaos.
It turned out they all had little hardbacked notebooks that they had handwritten themselves, containing the various slash codes they needed to make text bold, italic, save, open, print, and so on! The mouse concept was completely alien to them.
In later years, when accessing some of the SOP files produced at that time (by then, we typed them ourselves instead of relying on secretaries), I discovered that all the formatting - even in WordPerfect 6.0a documents - had been achieved using the space bar! No tabs, no columns, no tables - just the space bar. Every physical line had a [CR] at the end, as the concept of the 'paragraph' in word-processing terms was not known to them!
I discovered this when I was trying to reformat some text and it wasn't having it. I turned on the code display and the screen filled with the periods/dots that represented a space.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
