Farewell, Typewriters
The last typewriter factory in the world is closing down and, for some reason, it makes me a bit melancholic.
I'm not that old but my first office job included typing up real estate contracts on a typewriter. I'm rather glad to have had the experience. I'm a much better typist on account of it.
And I remember that when my father, a Lutheran pastor, left our congregation in California to serve a congregation in Colorado in 1983, the former congregation bought him an awesome, new-fangled electronic typewriter. It was able to correct mistakes! Can you imagine?
Finally, I'll offer my favorite typewriter image. Anyone else slightly blue over the typewriter's demise? Or should we simply celebrate the technological improvements that led to its destruction?
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May '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
The computer keyboard is just an evolved typewriter, so there's no nostalgia here. There used to be a joke about 20 years ago that you could tell when mid-management types had been on the computers at work because there was Wite-Out® on the CRT monitors. Now there aren't even any CRT's, just thin LED screens.
Feb '11
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
I thought that was a blonde joke.
May '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
EJ has no nostalgia! Well, the Murder, She Wrote Theme is unlikely to alter his curmudgeonlidom.
However, this could have pianistic repercussions. Strong fingers are needed for light typing and filing. They are not needed for interweb stuff the kids like. But they are needed for playing somethin on your pianola.
Jan '11
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
More like devolved: the computer keyboard is a mere input device, while the typewriter was an integrated input & output device. The keyboard, too, will soon devolve into nothingness, as can be seen in this absurd video. And this one.
Edited on Apr 26, 2011 at 7:25amDec '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Mollie you bring back many memories of my Adler electric typewriter and college. The return key sounded like you were dropping a clutch. It had a nice dual ribbon - no need for white out ( Yet another product that made the inventor a small fortune). My Adler was in high demand by my fellow classmates..
May '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Leroy Anderson fan?
Jun '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
No nostalgia. Good riddance!!!!
I miss typewriters about as much as I miss having to shovel coal into our furnace when I was a kid.
Mar '11
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
I type the way Columbus sailed--I find a key and land on it--so the typewriter's demise doesn't kill me, but I understand your melancholy. I'm a mechanic who entered the trade when cars and motorcycles still had mechanical point ignitions, and carburetors you could adjust by swapping jets.
I wonder how many men on Ricochet know how to adjust points?
Edited on Apr 26, 2011 at 7:35amRe: Farewell, Typewriters
About 6 or 8 years ago I was in an antique shop talking to the owner. My son called out to me, "Hey Dad, what's this thing?"
It was a typwriter.
May '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
EJHill
Leroy Anderson fan? · Apr 26 at 7:23am
Oh dear. Not a Jerry Lewis fan. Cause anyone could do what he did.
Which dovetails neatly into the point re Murder, She Wrote. Murder takes effort. Like, finger strength. Trust me. So does playing the piano. That theme is almost as evocative as the theme from Dexter. Lets you know with what you're dealing, in a suggestive way.
Sep '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
By the time I was in elementary school (late 80's early 90's) we were already using computers and saving our word processing documents on those fancy floppy disks.
Most of my encounters with typewriters involved using old ones as toys as a child.
I look around office buildings now and wonder how the world functioned without computers. I can't imagine.
Jul '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
My memories of the TypeWriter goes back to Junior High.
A buddy and I took typing first semester 8th grade. We took a major amount of ribbign from all our friends, "Typing? That's for Girls!"
"Yes!!! We Know!" we were the only two guys in a room full of girls.
By the second semester of the 9th grade a bunch of other guys had seen the light.
Today I type 74 words per minute on a computer keyboard because of those classes.
I shall miss the machine with it's klackity klack sound, when one was banging away on a project, and the Ding at the end of a line. And there is no sound as satisfying, or as much a punctuation to frustration, as the zzzzzziippp of yanking a sheet of paper out of the roller.
And while the computer keyboard has the [Return] key of the IBM Selectric, it lacks the shining silver arm of the adler which you shot your right hand up to engage the return immediatly after the unmistakable Ding!
Farewell ye Typewriter, you served us well!
Sep '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
I will wax nostalgic for the IBM selectric. It had the ball to type the letters and automatic error correction (as mentioned above). But above all that when you turned it on the whole thing vibrated a little bit and the force of the typing ball could be viscerally felt. It felt, for lack of a better word, powerful.
Feb '11
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
The demise of the typewriter is closely linked to the demise of the *secretary*....several years ago, a software executive commented that: "The main thing we've done with the computer revolution so far is this---at great expense, we have converted highly-paid executives into incompetent clerk-typists."
Many secretaries actually played an important if not always acknowledged part in helping to bring order out of chaos, and I suspect many organizations would be better off if they have a few more of them.
Dec '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Tommy De Seno: About 6 or 8 years ago I was in an antique shop talking to the owner. My son called out to me, "Hey Dad, what's this thing?"
It was a typwriter. · Apr 26 at 7:40am
Similar experience only for me it was a wall phone..... :(
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
I typed my dissertation on an IBM Selectric borrowed from a Yale undergraduate. Up in the attic, I keep the portable typewriter that I lugged off to college. Some day I will bring it down to show my children.
May '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Next up, Barak decides that instead of high speed trains, laid-off NASA engineers will get jobs developing solar powered electric typewriters.
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Two snapshots:
1982: Just after the Fourth of July weekend I started work as a speechwriter in the office of Vice President George H. W. Bush, where my predecessor, Christopher Buckley, had left behind an IBM Selectric. Since I had spent the past year using a second-hand manual typewriter to write a novel (living in Oxford, I was renting a centuries-old cottage on the Thames, which is to say a cottage that was tiny, dank, dark and cold, and the novel proved so bad even I couldn’t stand to read it), I felt a kind of rapture. An electric typewriter. I had rejoined the modern world. America! Technology!
2008: My middle son, Nico: "Dad, when you were my age, which did you have, a PC or a Mac?"
Edited on Apr 26, 2011 at 9:09amMar '11
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
Gus Marvinson: I
I wonder how many men on Ricochet know how to adjust points? · Apr 26 at 7:33am
Edited on Apr 26 at 07:35 am
Gus still do it on my 1960's Lycombing O-540 in my Piper, and when one of the two old point style ignitions crapped out over Lake Michigan I would have really preferred the reliability of a modern ignition to the points and magnetos.
Not there yet Cal, I would rather play with the old planes, at least it has some recognized social utility.
Jun '10
Re: Farewell, Typewriters
I took typing class on a manual typewriter in high school and feel that it was one of the most important classes I ever took. Your fingers were aching after each lesson. I look at it with pride as a good "walking to and from school in the snow uphill both ways" story, but I certainly don't miss using it.
Then, I remember my mom bringing home a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. It was a thing of beauty. I took it to college and used it until senior year when I bought my first computer. The computer probably gave me more fits at the time, than the typewriter. That typewriter sat in the basement up until recently because we didn't have the heart to chuck it.
Lastly, the manual typewriter gave us our peculiar QWERTY keyboard design. It was designed this way to avoid commonly used keys getting jammed together while typing. And interestingly enough, it was designed so that you could type typewriter all on the top row of letters.