typewriter

Forget 'BlackBerry's, we didn't even have trash bags when I was growing up. It was several years after I left college that a computer any smaller than a 'Cooper' could be found in school. (in my area I think Drexel had PCs first) This thing I'm tippy-tapping away on once required the strength of one's fingers to actually produce a typed character. It was kind of like a keyboard, a printer, and a BowFlex all wrapped into one. We learned to type in school to the accompaniment of specially produced '45s', played on a 'record player', which super-imposed the sound of a metronome onto songs like 'Baby Elephant Walk' and 'The Alley Cat'. The teacher would 'flip' the '45' and the same song would play a little faster. "Fingers on the home row and...asdf..." We were up to 35 wpm in no time (I think they were 'Royal' typewriters). I'm trying not to sound like my Dad here, though it's inevitable. When I was young, I found Walkie-Talkies and a clock radio under the Christmas tree- when he was young he found unshelled nuts and a 'Moon Mullins' doll [whatever the hell that is]. So I'll never make a strong enough case for being 'technologically deprived'. But it was several years after college before I was able to afford my first 'electric typewriter' (a 'brother' [{sic}, among the first brand names to dispense with a capital letter, that should have clued me]). On it, the now bulging muscles of my fingers produced words like 'suuusssstttaaaainnnnnnnablle' and 'waaas', suddenly I was typing 112 wpm (I had to revert to the hunt-and-peck method). It required an ink 'cartridge' that offered a pretty clear trade-off with the ink 'ribbon'- you could no longer type in red but you could backspace and retype a character holding down a correction tape button and, voila, instant white-out! Maybe one day I'll offer up some snippets of the oblique poetry and unsolicited manuscripts I chattered out on my 'brother'. They comprise a quite marked era because... about two or three years after perhaps my first purchase over $100. every 'brother' ink cartridge for 'electric typewriters' disappeared from the shelves. (They never deserved a capital b). If you are under 30 you probably aren't horrified but in my day, we expected things that cost A HUNDRED DOLLARS to last forever. I was to write in long-hand for the next twenty years. Now I'm not saying I mistrust technology on the whole, I certainly don't have a problem with the price of keypads, and oh the choices!

To their credit, you could pour a five pound bag of sugar through the keys of one of those old 'Royal's and it would keep on thwapping away. But there is a moral. Back-up. In school we had carbon paper, which I don't miss. The 'brother' had a memory key which would automatically produce a second copy. But the 'recordable disc' is the hi-tech equivalent of putting the carbon paper in backwards. My advice, before the '_+R' goes the way of the '45': Get it in writing.