This is a cool article

[EternalFantasies]

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/handmade-bill-weir-the-wonder-list/index.html

The video in it...

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/handmade-bill-weir-the-wonder-list/index.html

The video in it...

Long before anyone ever thought about computers, Blaine French and I were the only two males in our high school graduating class of 1968 to enroll in the semester long basic typewriting class. The rest of the class, of course, were girls anticipating their future roles as secretaries.

Blaine and I anticipated a commitment to a journalism career and knew we would need keyboard skills. And I didn't want to be saddled with a one finger "hunt and peck" technique which I viewed as severely limiting.

My first professional magazine job came with a manual Royal as seen in the video.

My first personal machine at home was that Godforsaken Underwood, also seen in the video, that looks like it's from the 1920s.

Later, when laser printers and networked workstations were prevalent in the office environment but comparable electronics were still not available in the home, I wanted to produce professional looking documents for my personal use -- namely resumes and job letters.

So, I sprang for a Xerox 960 electric typewriter -- a $900 clone of the $1,300 IBM Selectric.

What I'm saying is, that video brought back memories.

 

[oggbashan]

My eldest aunt was a Lady Typewriter before 1914. At that time it was a high tech and high paid job.

In the 1920s my father and mother were both telegraphists, operating telegraph machines - like typewriters but all upper case letters. In the 1980s my father was recorded on video in a museum operating a telegraph machine from 1910. Even then he was able to type accurately at 180 words a minute. The staff had thought that the practical maximum the machine was capable of was 100 wpm but my father used the oddities of the machine to type letters in a weird order that would speed the rate.

My parents MET as telegraphists at the Central Telegraph Office in London. They had left it and had married long before it was destroyed in the blitz of 1940.

 

[EternalFantasies]

I didn't even notice the other videos, it's the first that i watched.

I think a typewriter comeback would be like the nokia's relaunch of their 3110.

I didn't need one, I still had mine

 

[Hypoxia]

My 8th-grade jr-hi-school typing class contained girls and boys learning to type because it seemed like a good skill for future writers and clerks alike. Class was interrupted when loudspeakers announced that President Kennedy had been shot. I typed a memorial note on our family Royal that night.

US Army thought I'd be a good RATTer (radioteletype operator) and sent me to train on a KSR-33 Teletype keyboard which required about 40-50 pounds of PUSH to depress each key. I got up to 80 words/minute on that. Were my hands strong? Heh heh...

Manual typewriters are fun.. Electrics are faster but don't work in power outages. There's always my BIC pen...

 

[Boxlicker101]

During the 1953 - 54 school year in high school, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, either a Royal or an Underwood. That class is still the most beneficial one I took in HS.

 

[EternalFantasies]

I preferred electric typewriters coz they had an erase tape too,

The manuals u needed to hold a card on the area to whiten...

Man things changed... and im around half ur respective ages.