^^ Coincidentally, "ASCII" is the Roman numeral for "1934." I=mc2. I stopped using cursive in 2nd grade, because I thought it was stupid to have a second, harder-to-read, version of writing. My teacher was furious, because I was precociously smart and she couldn't understand why I would rebel over anything to do with writing. But I was also very eccentric and stubborn. Imagine. Actually, my signature is like that, too, but it's very aesthetic. I spend years working on it as a teenager; as an artist, I wanted it to look good-- my goal was to have something that would look at home on the Declaration of Independence. The patient was George Roman, who held the patent on numeric fonts. He was admitted after suffering a nervous breakdown while trying to find the end of pi.
When I was first learning cursive in elementary school, the teacher, and several of the teachers that taught higher grades were all like "You need to learn this, starting next year and throughout the rest of your life no one will accept papers that aren't written in cursive!!!" I replied, "that's bullshit. With computers coming into increasingly widespread use, in a few years teachers are going to want typed papers and not accept anything handwritten. So, instead of whatever bullshit waste of time you had planned, you should be teaching us how to type." and then they were like "what did I tell you about swearing? Go to the principal's office!" Well, history has shown who was right. Also, I've never had a teacher insist that handwritten assignments be in cursive. A few years later, when they tried to teach typing, I was like "This is bullshit! In a few years all computers will have dictation software that actually works. You should be teaching us how to speak clearly instead of this pushing buttons thing. Also, If you insist on teaching us typing, we should be using Dvorak keyboards. In a few years they'll be much more popular than this QWERTY bullshit." And then, of course, I was sent to the principal's office again. Also this time I was wrong. Despite all this insight, while I almost never write in cursive, I can do it easily and it looks pretty nice. However, I type all the time and never learned how to do it properly. I like looking at the keys... and Dvorak keyboards!
You stopped using cursive in second grade? Where did you go to school? I didn't even learn cursive until third grade. You should have told the teacher, "When you said we need to write in cursive, I thought you meant it was OK to curse!"
I guess I was about 25 years ahead of my time. The Edward Everett in Dorchester (i.e. Boston). It would have been around 1969. We had this special lined paper-- solid lines on the top and bottom and a dotted line in the middle-- so you would know exactly where the little curves would go.