I started college in the fall of 1987, when, as far as my midwestern culture was concerned, computers were for programmers and maybe a few cutting-edge artistic types, but definitely not for regular people. My friends, mostly in the performing arts, went off to colleges where computers were generally unavailable to anyone outside the computer sciences. I headed out to my new school with the electronic typewriter I was given for graduation, and which it turns out I would never use. Why? Because I was a student at Carnegie Mellon University, where even freshman vocal performance majors were required to use computers—an oddity for the time that would ultimately influence the course of my life more than I could possibly have imagined.
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