Typewriters

Children today are so deprived! (Okay, many are also depraved, but that is not where this is going.)

My children have never had the pleasure of trying to prepare a written report on a typewriter. They have heard of them, and they have seen them in movies, but they have never had to use one. Those of us who are older remember such wonderful things as:
- the shift key actually lifting the entire carriage of the mechanism so that the upper case character would strike the ribbon instead of the lower case;
- getting our hands horribly messy trying to change the ribbon (it's what had the "ink" on it that formed the letter on the paper;
- going so fast that more than one lever tried to strike the paper at the same time, thus jamming the mechanism (okay, I was so slow - 30 words per minute - that I had to TRY to jam the mechanism);
- the fact that our modern keyboard was designed to slow us down; with the lever mechanism, even with this design, a good typist (one who could hit 50 ro more words per minute) would often jam it; almost any arrangement of keys, even a random one, once learned, would improve the speed; but to prevent jams they came up with this one; inertia prevents us from changing it;
- "correcting" mistakes by hitting the Backspace key, typing over the character with a different character, Backspace, another different character, etc.;
- the joy of that wonderful new product invented by the mother of one of the Monkees (truth) - that amazing little product that allowed us to correct mistakes that were ALMOST unnoticeable - White Out;
- carbon copies; when you "cc" someone on your e-mail, it stands for "carbon copy"; typing the same thing twice was a royal pain; for those of us with ten thumbs it was impossible; it wasn't long after the invention of the typewriter that someone came up with the carbon copy; if hitting a key against an inked ribbon could put the character on the page, then placing a thin sheet of inked paper between two sheets of paper would cause that same strike to place the same character at the same time onto a second sheet; carbon paper was also messy, but it saved a lot of time when you wanted to keep a copy of a business letter or such (even though White Out did not work on the cc);
- triplicate forms were tricky; you had to strike harder to get the character to come out readable on the third form;
- getting paper fed into the the typewriter was an art form - one that few of us ever mastered;
- some important parts of the typing lessons that I had in high school were about NOT looking at what I was doing - neither at the keyboard nor at the paper being typed; the teacher wanted us to look only at the handwritten item we were supposed to copy into type (more often it was a book that we were copying); looking back and forth from book or letter to keyboard or typed paper slowed us down - bad, bad bad; the problem was that the typewriter didn't tell you when you had run out of the paper; you were somehow supposed to know that without looking; I don't know how many sentences I typed that only had a portion of the characters on the paper and the rest on the cylinder against which it rested (and there were more that were typed only on the cylinder);
- having a manual mechanism that you pushed and pulled to place margins and tab stops;
- no Ctrl key; no Alt key; no Delete key; no Home or Enter; the carriage moved the paper to the left - one character each time you struck a character (fixed width font, like Courier); there was a large lever that you pushed to return the carriage to the right and advance the paper to the next line (thus the ASCII character "crlf" - carriage return / line feed);
- the bell near the end of the line (five characters away) to warn you that you could not get another whole word in, so you had better do the carriage return line feed thingy if you wanted to continue;
- ignoring the bell and typing a whole sentence on the 80th space on the line;
- not relying on electricity to get the job done;
- not losing anything when the power went out;
- remembering to cover the typewriter when not in use (or not remembering); they get horribly dusty if not covered; the dust jams the mechanism and gets on the stike levers, which in turn can mess up a character.

Okay, what have I forgotten? Let me know what other interesting aspects of typing I have failed to mention here.