One of the more popular books in the rotation for LBA and SoBA is called Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type. It occurs to me that while reading this story, SoBA and LBA might be confused with the use of something called a "typewriter." Sadly, back in April 2011, it was reported the last typewriter factory closed its doors.
I remember taking "Keyboarding" in (junior?) high school. I wound up dropping the class because I had already "learned" to type and wasn't in the mood to relearn. Now, of course, I can type pretty fast and don't have to look at the keyboard (I'm not doing it now) to make sure that I am typing correctly. I do sort of hover near the "home keys" but the backspace / delete key is much easier to use than "correct-a-type" ever was.
In keyboarding, we used IBM Selectric typewriters. It had that very satisfying hum when you turned it on. Sometimes it felt like you could take it outside to mow the lawn with it. We had a manual typewriter around the house growing up until that finally gave up the ghost. When I went off to college, I had a brand spanking new word processing typewriter that had a disk drive that you could type your papers and then save! them to this piece of plastic. It had a little delay on it that you would type a line of text and then it would magically appear on the paper. It had a flip screen that served as a keyboard cover. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was called or who made it. But then again, if you can't remember a lot from college, you must have had a pretty good time, right?
Here in the office (where I deal primarily with electronic records) there was a typewriter around for a while - I don't know if it is still here somewhere. But with a computer on everyone's desk and the "Avery Plug-in" available so readily, is anyone still typing out addresses on envelopes (the last line of defense for needing a typewriter)?
So, dear reader. Typewriters? What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment