From the July 1982 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows describes Living With a Computer. It echoes thoughts I had when first working with computers (and seeing friends who weren't):

The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen

But he also talks about things that make me chuckle today, such as spending "$800 for a cut-rate disk drive" to store up to 100k on a single disk (to get around the 48k RAM limit). He also discusses the state of the OS battles:

My system uses the North Star Disk Operating System, abbreviated DOS and pronounced doss, but North Star didn't win. The winner was a DOS called CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers), which has become the industry standard and is earning millions for a formerly small company known as Digital Research.
...
Digital Research has produced a version called CP/ M-86, which will work on the [IBM] Personal Computer and other 16-bit systems ... but many people suspect that IBM will wage a counteroffensive with a DOS of its own.

Bill who?