Margaret O'MaraInterview
Historian, professor
Adapted from Margaret O'Mara's interview on Uses This, published 23 August 2021. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I first touched a computer keyboard in a junior-high BASIC programming class, and the first thing I produced on a computer was a high-school term paper written on a Commodore 64.
The first computer I owned was a beautiful beige Macintosh 512Ke, purchased at the end of my freshman year in college, when printing involved taking a floppy disk to the campus computer center and its dot-matrix printers.
I use my 13" MacBook Pros until the keys wear off (the "N" is always the first to go) and am still in the honeymoon phase with my newest.
Indispensable analog technology includes multicolored Post-it notes for quick reminders and chapter storyboarding, Leuchtterm1917 notebooks for meeting notes and taking a break from screens, and black Uni-ball pens.
Communication
A year of online teaching and Zoom everything introduced me to essential new hardware.
Productivity
I now have fourteen years' worth of research notes on Zotero, which means I'll probably keep using it forever.
Notes
After trying many different kinds of software hacks for systems for jotting down stray thoughts and writing ideas, I realized simplest is best, and now just use the Notes app on my iPhone.
Coding & Development
Media
Storage
Other
After graduation, I migrated back to the world of blue screens and blinking cursors with several years of MS-DOS on my work computer, then Windows laptops in graduate school, then back to Mac as Apple surged forth in its early '00s Jobsian renaissance.
I archive online sources at Perma.cc so that future readers won't encounter broken links.