Typewriters are cool.
In my day, my mom had an electric Smith-Corona from 1968. It was cool. I remember that it had a switch so you could switch between black and red ink. But it seems like the print wasn't real sharp, even though it wasn't that old back in the '70s.
In the early '80s, my mom buyed a new electric typewriter, and I think it was also a Smith-Corona. Instead of the old-style ribbons, it used cartridges. It also had a couple of keys that could be replaced with special symbols you could send away for.
When I was about 4, we got a manual typewriter for my bedroom. I don't know why we got it, because I was barely old enough to read. What would a 4-year-old ever do with a typewriter? But we only had it a couple months before we threw it away because the 'I' key broke.
When I took typing in high school, the classroom had about 30 electric typewriters but only one manual typewriter. Guess who was assigned the manual typewriter? This thing was probably 50 years old. Also, someone threw a stick of bubble gum down inside one of the electric typewriters.
In 1992, when I was a college freshman, I got a Brother electric typewriter.
I worked at the local library for many years in the '90s, and the typewriters there were the most advanced I ever used. They had an electronic chip that stored huge amounts of text, so you could type up book cards and pockets just by pulling a lever. The other people at the library got mad when I discovered that you could process books a lot faster this way.
Never owned one ever. Never used one ever.
First had a manual Smith Corona. It would jam up if you typed in 2 nearby keys. Then around 1990 I got an Brother electric typewriter. It was not needed a couple years later.
My Mom was an accountant with General Motors and thusly had several in the early 1980s. The names of any of them elude me but they we fun to smash keys on.
I used my mother's 1940's-vintage Royal manual typewriter when I was college in the mid '70s. She had used it when she was in college in the late '40s. I used that piece of junk classic piece of machinery until I bought my first computer and printer in 1982.
As a kid in the late 1960's and early 1970's we had several around the house. When I went off to college in the late '70s I had a Smith-Corona portable that (if I remember correctly) looks similar to the one pictured below. It had a lid that would snap on over the top to provide a carrying handle. There was no "one" key; for a "one" you had to type a lower-case "ell", and for an exclamation point you had to type a "single-quote"-"backspace"-"period".
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F9c%2F54%2Fd2%2F9c54d212c0d1fb27d641574ac8be1a2b.jpg&hash=ee47a0a824c73a33b16271a08fbf6480721afb4f)
After graduating and seeing the start of the 1980's, I could see that there wasn't much future with typewriters, so my new "typewriter" was an Apple II+ computer and Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer (both circa 1981). I even wrote a rudimentary word processor in BASIC (with some speed critical parts in 6502 assembly language). This was at a time when there wasn't much commercial software; back then you mostly "rolled your own".
We have three typewriters in the family. One is an Underwood manual. That one is a beast. The frame for it is cast iron.
The other two are similar Smith-Corona electric models that are two-toned. One is light blue/dark blue, and the other tan/brown. Both come in cases that look like hard-sided suitcases. One has manual carriage return, and the other has a carriage return key.
My grandma gave me her old IBM Selectric typewriter (with the typeballs that could be swapped out if you wanted different fonts) long after typewriters stopped being useful (I think it was around 2001). I mostly used it for screwing around, because even at the age of 11, I was proficient with Microsoft Word.
I did actually get to use it for something halfway useful; for a few years there I was in the awkward spot where my typing was much, much faster than writing by hand, yet all of my middle-school teachers were behind on technology to the point that they didn't allow use of computers for written assignments, because spell check was considered cheating. So I asked for special dispensation to use a typewriter, and a few of them permitted it. My last couple of years of high school, more emphasis was placed on proper use and formatting of sources, so computers were actually required for those assignments. (We still had to print them out and hand them in on paper, though.)
Until I was almost through 8th grade, we did not have a PC. We had my parents' old Olivetti manual typewriter that dated back to the 1960s. Typing on that thing was awful. My dad was reluctant to get a PC because he was concerned my brother and I would try to monopolize it to play games, but my mom put her foot down and said we had to have a PC before I started high school and more importantly, before it came time for me to apply to colleges.
The only times I've ever used electric typewriters are at a couple of office jobs I worked in the early 1990s during summers home from school. Those things were so much better than that Olivetti.
I have a couple. 1960s Underwood manual, heavy, still works but could probably use cleaning and lube, used to be my mom's when she was in grad school.
1950s portable Olivetti, works, used to be my grandfather's.
We had an old manual (can't remember what brand; I think it was a Royal) that required some brute force to use. For Christmas my freshman year of college I got a portable Smith-Corona electric version with the insertable ribbon cartridges. I knew I would get a lot of use out of it, typing papers and news stories since I was majoring in journalism, and I did. I continued to use it regularly until 1987, when I went to work for a newspaper that was just starting out with desktop publishing and I did all my composing on an Apple Macintosh computer, either a Plus or a 512K. I still used that typewriter for typing letters and things at home for many more years. I still have it, and I'll bet it still works.
As an elementary schooler–before my parents allowed us to have a computer–I was given a used Smith Corona electric typewriter. A quick image search suggests that it was a Coronet Super 12 (https://typewriterdatabase.com/197x-smith-corona-coronet-super-12.2941.typewriter). Based on the overall look and smell of the machine and its color (brown), I assume it was from the late '70s. As a young child, I thought it was a terrific typewriter–although tragedy struck one day when it it fell off my desk and the power carriage return stopped working. From then on, pressing return was a great way to generate a horrific buzzer sound effect.
(https://typewriterdatabase.com/img/gsmithcorona%20_2941_1407108633.jpg)
At some point, my mother had inherited a Royal electric typewriter about the same size and form factor as my Smith Corona but a few years older. I think it looked basically like the one below.
(https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/E40AAOSwOrNfEeig/s-l1600.jpg)
Quote from: dlsterner on November 20, 2020, 11:43:32 PM
I had a Smith-Corona portable that (if I remember correctly) looks similar to the one pictured below.
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2F9c%2F54%2Fd2%2F9c54d212c0d1fb27d641574ac8be1a2b.jpg&hash=ee47a0a824c73a33b16271a08fbf6480721afb4f)
We had the same typewriter in my family–I think primarily a toy for my younger sister. And it was the same aqua color in the photo. I thought it was just a neat product: light, easy to carry, smart-looking. Kind of like the typewriter equivalent to an Apple IIc. It seemed like the kind of typewriter you'd throw onto the passenger seat of your Karmann Ghia as you escaped to your seaside cottage to write in solitude.
But being completely manual, it was actually hard to use, and since the type head's striking force depended on your own finger force, the intensities of letters on the typewritten page were all over the place; some were reasonably strong and others very faint.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 21, 2020, 05:01:34 PM
My grandma gave me her old IBM Selectric typewriter (with the typeballs that could be swapped out if you wanted different fonts) long after typewriters stopped being useful (I think it was around 2001). I mostly used it for screwing around, because even at the age of 11, I was proficient with Microsoft Word.
I loved the Selectrics my office used before the switch to word processors. Even after the switchover, there usually was one somewhere in the office, I could use when the secretaries left for the day, until I (and most of the secretaries) took buyouts in 2011. Indeed, I might still have somewhere the Letter Gothic typeball I bought to use with them. They were handy for small jobs such as envelopes and address labels, and forms (especially carbon-paper) you couldn't fill in on a computer until the advent of fillable PDFs.
I'd have a Selectric of my own, except I have no room for one in my tiny apartment.
While I was in school in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I owned an electric typewriter, probably a Smith Corona similar to the one in Brian's post (except gray rather than brown).
Speaking of typewriters, one thing I preferred on typewriters versus computer keyboards is that on typewriters, hitting Shift plus either a period or a comma gave you a period or a comma, making you less likely to type, for example U>S> if your style guide calls for periods in that sort of abbreviation. (Of course now I have autocorrect configured to change that sort of thing on every PC I use. In the DOS days, that generally wasn't an option.) I suspect the average typist doesn't intend to use the < > symbols all that often.
There was this installment many years ago of the comic strip Shoe by the late, great Jeff MacNelly -- I can't find it online but it went like this:
Irv the Handyman shows up with something covered with a cloth.
Irv: "I've built a new word processing system with all the glitches removed."
Perfesser: "Sure."
Irv: "No more worrying about losing your stuff somewhere in the memory bank -- or having your screen jus' go blank -- or waiting for the printout! No, sir! This little beauty bypasses all that complex microcircuitry, the floppy discs, the bulky printers, and other this and thats! This is the 21st century answer to to today's awkward, cumbersome word processor! With my new system, you can actually compose right at the keyboard and get an instantaneous printout -- with a foolproof memory and retrieval capability -- and -- the greatest technological breakthrough of all -- it sells for only $119.50!"
Perfesser: "Irv, this is incredible! What's it called?"
Irv: "Gentlemen, I give you..."
(he pulls off the cloth cover)
Irv: "The Underwood!"
I remember my sister and my dad using an electronic typewriter but, by the time I got to the age of needing to type up assignments, we already had a PC with WordPerfect on it. However, in the 1990s, there was still an occasional need to type (not write) on an official form or application of some sort. For those times, I remember going to a fellow church member's house down the street to use her old manual typewriter.
Before all of that, I do remember using a manual typewriter, but my memory isn't good enough to say where or whose it was.
The first one I ever used was given to my folks by my grandmother, and it has a Roadgeek connection. Sometime in the late 1940's. my grandmother became the first female route manager for Atlantic Greyhound at their main office in Charleston, West Virginia. When the main office was closed in 1960, she was able to purchase some of her office supplies including the heavy wooden desk and old Underwood typewriter. I refinished the desk several times while I was in high school. My folks weren't happy that my handwriting was messing up the finish, so they introduced me to the typewriter. I highly suspect it was original from when the AGL office opened in 1931. I bought an older Royal electric typewriter for college.
It never occurred to me that I would follow in her footsteps and have to develop numerous transit bus operation plans in the course of my career (particularly since I am a railroader by trade).
Quote from: 1995hoo on November 22, 2020, 08:52:37 AM
Speaking of typewriters, one thing I preferred on typewriters versus computer keyboards is that on typewriters, hitting Shift plus either a period or a comma gave you a period or a comma, making you less likely to type, for example U>S> if your style guide calls for periods in that sort of abbreviation.
On the other hand, all typewriters I've ever used produce the "shifted" character whenever caps lock is engaged. (Every computer I've used still produces digits when number keys are typed and caps lock engaged.) So when you use your Smith Corona to type an angry all caps letter to the governor: "PLEASE VETO H.B. 2787!" , you wind up with "PLEASE VETO H.B. @&*&!" .
Quote from: briantroutman on November 22, 2020, 07:46:04 PM
"PLEASE VETO H.B. @&*&!" .
I'm sure there have been plenty of requests to veto me with profanity thrown in! :bigass:
Quote from: hbelkins on November 22, 2020, 08:18:37 PM
Quote from: briantroutman on November 22, 2020, 07:46:04 PM
"PLEASE VETO H.B. @&*&!" .
I'm sure there have been plenty of requests to veto me with profanity thrown in! :bigass:
Good thing you have a secretary to weed those out.
Having started high school in 1970, and graduated college in 1979, I did not use any word processors in my school days. My parents gave me a portable Smith-Corona when I was probably a freshman or sophomore in high school, and I used that until I bought my first "PC" in 1986 (it was a Tandy). I took typing in high school, but I don't remember what the typewriters were - they were electric, but definitely not fancy.
When I had fancy typing projects (such as programs for school plays), I would go to my Dad's office and use an IBM Selectric. They were state-of-the-art in the 1970s.
I guess the first time we had a word processor and printer, I was in 7th grade. (I know it was when the song "Conga" was popular.) The printer only lasted until I was a high school sophomore, when it went haywire. It was a letter quality printer, but we replaced it with a used dot matrix printer that we buyed from some guy in Cincinnati. I remember using it for school papers that year, and some of those assignments were horrible.
The word processor we used was the Bank Street Writer. It was not very advanced. It couldn't underline text, so we had to use a pen and a ruler.
How many words per minute could you type? I took typing in jr high one year but never got past the hunt & peck method.
I'm surprised the young-uns here even know what a typwriter is.
I typed about 80 wpm. Which is good for an average person but not nearly as fast as a professional typist.
In high school, I typed around 65-70 words per minute. I haven't measured since then, and that was more than 20 years ago.
On a manual typewriter, though, I bet it's a LOT slower–if for no other reason than the stiffer action of the keys.
I learned to type on a computer keyboard, and I remember that I had to slow down my typing a bit on the Selectric, lest I outrun it. (That, and be more careful, since it didn't have any self-correction tape, and White-Out is a bitch.)
Yeah, Wite-Out never dried as quickly as I wanted, and I always got impatient. Then I'd type over it before it had completely dried, which never looked good.
By the way, I once heard someone counter the statement "gas is expensive right now" with "not compared to a gallon of Wite-Out".
Wite-Out! All y'all are getting fancy. I had to use Ko-Rec-Type paper. It was very obvious when I made a typing mistake. That stuff was horrible.
I remember back when 'The Simpsons' first started, there was some show on right before it that always ended with a man pulling a sheet of paper out of a typewriter. Anyone else remember this? I think he wore a red polo shirt.
Never owned a typewriter but I do own several IBM Model Ms (and one model F). Supposedly they were designed to feel and sound like typewriters to give people who just switched to a PC from a typewriter a bit of familiarity. I've considered picking a typewriter up at Goodwill a few times (the stores near me still have at least a good number of them stocked for whatever reason, I have no idea why anyone would buy them in this day and age unless you're weird like me, or you're old and the world's biggest luddite) but I decided against it each time not wanting to waste money on something that I would likely get for the novelty then never use again.
Technology Connections also has a decent video on those late-era electric typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-GdTvkLUFA
Quote from: 1995hoo on November 23, 2020, 09:53:12 PM
Wite-Out! All y'all are getting fancy. I had to use Ko-Rec-Type paper. It was very obvious when I made a typing mistake. That stuff was horrible.
But you didn't have to wait for Ko-Rec-Type to dry! You could type over it again immediately! And if you photocopied your sheet it was very hard to see that it had been corrected.
Quote from: bandit957 on November 24, 2020, 07:40:17 AM
I remember back when 'The Simpsons' first started, there was some show on right before it that always ended with a man pulling a sheet of paper out of a typewriter. Anyone else remember this? I think he wore a red polo shirt.
Stephen J. Cannell–novelist and creator of numerous television dramas, including
The Rockford Files,
The A-Team, and
21 Jump Street. The logo below was re-shot multiple times (with the shelf of awards behind him getting more full with each successive version), the score was updated, and Cannell had a different outfit in each. If I'm not mistaken, each featured an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Quote from: kphoger on November 23, 2020, 07:47:02 PM
Yeah, Wite-Out never dried as quickly as I wanted, and I always got impatient. Then I'd type over it before it had completely dried, which never looked good.
The problem that I always had was getting it to go on evenly enough that it didn't glob all up. The bristles on the little brush cap would always clump together and make it hard to get an even coat. Later on they made an improved cap that had a triangular sponge instead of a brush, which helped somewhat. And yes, I accidentally wrote or typed through a still-tacky coat of Wite-Out multiple times. I wanted to get my homework done, not wait on some overrated white paint. (I used it more for papers that were required to be handwritten in ink. Since I normally used the typewriter for my own personal use, I'd usually just backspace over the offending word and type slashes over each letter to cross it out, since I was the only one who was going to see the finished product and I didn't care enough to mess with it.)
The most frustrating thing was that I had to do all of this when it was
not necessary. We had the technology to avoid it, in the form of the Gateway computer sitting just feet away from me while I was struggling with Wite-Out. But I wasn't allowed to use it.
Quote from: index on November 24, 2020, 08:20:28 AM
Never owned a typewriter but I do own several IBM Model Ms (and one model F). Supposedly they were designed to feel and sound like typewriters to give people who just switched to a PC from a typewriter a bit of familiarity.
Pretty much every post I make on this forum was typed on a Model M keyboard. I don't think they were intentionally designed to emulate a typewriter, because the stuff responsible for the feel and sound is actually the mechanism that activates the switches. This mechanism is incredibly durable–the keyboard I'm typing on was built in 1987 and works perfectly.
Quote from: kkt on November 24, 2020, 05:45:02 PM
Quote from: 1995hoo on November 23, 2020, 09:53:12 PM
Wite-Out! All y'all are getting fancy. I had to use Ko-Rec-Type paper. It was very obvious when I made a typing mistake. That stuff was horrible.
But you didn't have to wait for Ko-Rec-Type to dry! You could type over it again immediately! And if you photocopied your sheet it was very hard to see that it had been corrected.
:rofl: :rofl:
A photocopier was a luxury even when I was in junior high. I remember the ditto machine in elementary school. The smell of that thing would get you high.
Quote from: Scott5114 on November 24, 2020, 07:36:26 PM
Quote from: index on November 24, 2020, 08:20:28 AM
Never owned a typewriter but I do own several IBM Model Ms (and one model F). Supposedly they were designed to feel and sound like typewriters to give people who just switched to a PC from a typewriter a bit of familiarity.
Pretty much every post I make on this forum was typed on a Model M keyboard. I don't think they were intentionally designed to emulate a typewriter, because the stuff responsible for the feel and sound is actually the mechanism that activates the switches. This mechanism is incredibly durable—the keyboard I'm typing on was built in 1987 and works perfectly.
The buckling springs and tactility may be what emulates that to some degree. It has nothing on the IBM 5251 though which included a full-blown solenoid striking the inside of the case, that was definitely there to emulate a typewriter. If there is any switch better than these it's probably the beam springs found in that board.
Rejoice, another fellow Model M user. I type on a beautiful looking industrial model M, manufactured September 10 1993. Not my oldest, but my best sounding and rarest. I ordered a black and silver badge for it to try and emulate the look of the earlier industrial Ms, as well as reproductions, down to the exact color and font, of these cool-looking terminal keycaps present on some old industrial space savers (http://www.zwettler.net/typo3temp/_processed_/csm_IBM_Model_M_industrial_SSK_1395682_19930107_front_d9b2560b02.jpg), but both might not arrive until Spring 2021 or so. Right there is mine, and has typed probably most of the posts you've seen by me.
(https://i.imgur.com/XyLsXNQ.png)
The oldest one I have is a white label, was manufactured some time in Spring 1987 and I have it hooked up to a PS/2 Model 30 286. Both still work like a charm although the 1987 one isn't as loud and pingy as I'd like it to be. I don't think the plastic rivets are coming off though, nor has it already been bolt modded by a previous owner.
I finally had to stop using my old mechanical keyboard because computers stopped coming with the necessary port. When my wife and I bought our most recent computer a year or two ago, the store didn't even sell adapters for them anymore.
Quote from: 1995hoo on November 24, 2020, 09:40:03 PM
Quote from: kkt on November 24, 2020, 05:45:02 PM
Quote from: 1995hoo on November 23, 2020, 09:53:12 PM
Wite-Out! All y'all are getting fancy. I had to use Ko-Rec-Type paper. It was very obvious when I made a typing mistake. That stuff was horrible.
But you didn't have to wait for Ko-Rec-Type to dry! You could type over it again immediately! And if you photocopied your sheet it was very hard to see that it had been corrected.
:rofl: :rofl:
A photocopier was a luxury even when I was in junior high. I remember the ditto machine in elementary school. The smell of that thing would get you high.
When I was in high school, the public library and the school library both had photocopiers.
I had one English teacher in high school who just hated handwritten papers. He didn't actually announce it, but by the end of the second month the students figured out that the exact same paper would get a full grade higher if it was typed. Even if we just slashed out our typos instead of using liquid paper etc. This was before computers at home were available.
My current keyboard is mechanical with the loud Cherry MX Blue switches. :>
I still have a typewriter, but there was a time when I wanted a Brother Word Processor. Some guy was trying to sell off his old one on "Pawn Stars" a while back, and seeing it reminded me that I wanted one years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKcASlJf1XY
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aKwAAOSw-u9ftHj8/s-l1600.jpg (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aKwAAOSw-u9ftHj8/s-l1600.jpg)
Personally, I think Rick should've offered the guy a little more money because of the uniqueness of the product. Having said that, the guy should've taken his offer.