No more mechanical typewriters
The last factory producing mechnical typewriters finished production in 2009 and now only has 500 of them left.
They have been superceeded in all areas by computers, although there impact has yet to fade seeing as the QWERTY keyboard most people use was specifically designed to allow speedy use of them without them being jammed.
Gone the way of polaroid cameras and the VCR.
**CLACK**CLACK**CLACK**
More on the story here
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
I still have an old one at home. It is a portable with a nice hard case. It makes a great footrest for when I am sitting at the computer. I haven't used it as a typewriter in over 10 years.
I was a bit sad when I saw this story. I am old enough that I learned how to type on a typewriter. My high school had a typing room with rows of beautiful IBM Selectric typewriters, state of the art at the time.
By the time my sister took Typing class 5 years later, they'd all been replaced by Macs.
The Macs were easy to use, and they made your papers look a lot prettier, but somehow the experience of putting words down wasn't quite the same.
The clack clack clack sound is nostalgic of my childhood. My mother was doing her postgrad work when I was in grammar school, and she was always banging away at the typewriter. Now I can't imagine writing an entire PhD dissertation on a typewriter, but she did it!
Last edited by Sarahfeena; 26 Apr 2011 at 07:54 AM.
Wow, I can't fathom writing much more than a sentence on a typewriter. I've seen them, but never actually used one.
In honor of a great piece of technology for its day:
Using a PC is so much easier, but using a typewriter is so much more fun.
It also requires a lot more skill and practice to use a typewriter, because any mistake would ruin a sheet of paper.
In the land of the blind, the one-arm man is king.
How was a typewriter fun? I hated having to type out reports. I was using a computer by 1987 for nearly anything where I would have used a typewriter before. This was on crappy Zenith PCs in Lotus 123 loaded off a pair of 5˝" diskettes. By 1989 I owned an Amiga with a color dot matrix printer from word processing. So I wonder again, what was fun about a typewriter? Once the mechanics of the arms moving is observed in use, the rest is aggravating and on a manual, quite a bit tougher on the fingers. (OK, the last is minor, but seriously, a mechanical typewriter was noisy and the keys a bit tough.)
I had a typewriter I picked up at a garage sale as a kid, and then another gorgeous one I inherited from my grandmother. Sadly, my grandmother's typewriter was lost in the fire last year. I'd never used them much for serious writing, though. We had computers in the house in one form or another from the early '80s on (my mother always has been cutting edge), so typewriters were these neat, strange devices from a bygone era.
So now they are just dirt-covered English people in fur pelts with credit cards.
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