The Power of the Typewriter - We've Come a Long Way, Baby!

Oh, those fabulous writing machines!  To say "we’ve come a long way, Baby", would be a masterpiece of understatement!  My very first experience with a typewriter was during the summer following my first year in high school.  Mom thought it would be good for me to learn, so she enrolled me in a typing class.  Here we were – sitting up straight in our chairs with our hands perched over the keyboard, as if in attack mode.  Our heads tilted to the right and eyes glued to the book with our exercises – we weren’t supposed to watch what we were typing.  How many times can you keep typing this row: “asdfjkl;” before you start dreaming of those letters!  Once we mastered that row, we advanced to the upper and lower rows.  After what seemed to be an eternity of repetition, we  were now typing full sentences like:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

The typewriter was an ancient Underwood.  You know, the ones with all the keys and symbols on arms.  I don’t think they changed the model that much from the one in 1918!!! 

Once upon a time I recall that my mother rented a typewriter for a part time job she had addressing envelopes for some business.  That’s also during the time I helped her type up many of the family recipes on 3x5 index cards.  What I never enjoyed was typing multiple copies simultaneously using the dreaded carbon paper! Hitting keys harder to ensure they would be legible on the last page while maintaining the alignment of each paper was a true challenge!  And if one typed too quickly, the key arms would get twisted and stuck together.  

My high school graduation present from my parents was my very first typewriter.  It was a lovely blue Smith-Corona portable with matching carrying case.  It was really high tech for its time with a power space bar!  My brother used to love playing with that space bar since it sounded like a mini machine gun and drove me and my folks crazy!  In those days there were two typesets available – Pica 10 and Elite 10.  The Pica resembled the present day font of Courier while the Elite would be similar to Arial or Calibri.

During my college years, I got my first taste of working with professional electric “writing” machines.  These were the classic brown metal IBM Selectric typewriters, first introduced in 1961.  The keys were sensitive enough that even the slightest touch would impart that letter or symbol on your printed page.  If you had lead in your fingers, and really pressed on the key, you’d find an entire row of that very same letter!  The Selectric, for its time, was like the Cadillac of typewriters.  It was like going from driving a 1950s manual transmission car with four gears and a clutch to an automatic “tranny” where you just put the car in drive. 

 Instead of having all those arms with letters and symbols staring at you above your keys, IBM had a compact ball that held everything now hidden away under a cover with the typewriter ribbon. Another innovation was the ribbon cartridge rather than spools making replacement much easier.

THIS was every secretary’s dream machine so that they could now sound like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlqDFPLUhig

Producers of these fantastic writing machines aimed to please the volume of businesses that used them and so they kept improving their devices.  IBM streamlined the Selectric with their Series II (1971).  For the first time, instead of just having the typical Pica or Elite in 10 characters per inch (cpi), one could switch to a 12 with just a flip of an ingenious little lever on the top left side of the machine!  In addition, to eliminate the use of liquid “white out” to make corrections, IBM now had a little key where “X” marked the spot to backspace, a small tape with spools at either end which took the mistaken character or word away, and allowed the replacement to be typed just like magic.  Only thing was....make sure you inserted it so that the corrections would be made on the paper and not the typewriter ribbon!  The Series III was a refined model which added a few more whistles and bells as well.

My final typewriter was another IBM.  This one was from the Wheelwriter Series, either the 3 or 5.  Materials for this one seemed less sturdy.  Instead of the “ball” this version came with interchangeable print wheels which were more fragile.  The wheels provided the user with some flexibility for typesets, however, one had to remember to return to the original wheel. 

Like the Selectrics, a correction tape locked in place over the cartridge ribbon. The keys had a very “tinny” sound unlike the more solid state Selectrics.  Later Wheelwriter series functioned like a word processor, holding several lines of text in its memory before the user decided to have them print.

Little did I ever suspect just around the corner – 1984 or 1985 – that writing machines would appear such as the IBM PC jr., aka, the “peanut”.  This was a far cry from the little Atari that we hooked up to the TV set to play Pac Man or Space Invaders, or the Macintosh with a disk for a program and another for your work data.  This required a whole new skill set with mandatory classes.  I learned a new language called DOS (disk operating system) with commands I had to memorize in order to operate the machine (Oh, those were the days of C:\).  My management staff were nurses, not computer geeks.  What IBM forgot is that not everyone speaks computereez.  It did guarantee me a certain amount of job security as a troubleshooter for those who couldn’t recall how to login to their PC, or find their files.  

Yes, we’d come a long way from those huge floor to ceiling computers with reels running inside of them.  Or even the days of working on a Burroughs system that used flimsy 8 ½” floppy disks for backups.  I was even glad when Burroughs upgraded and downsized floppy disks to 5 ¼”!  

Sometime around 1990, we had all of our PCs upgraded/updated.  We were introduced to classes for Microsoft Office and a thing called “Windows 3.1”.  Then came Windows XP replacing Win 95!  We became proficient at keeping several "windows" open, resizing them and using drag and drop” to move or copy files.  If this taught me anything, it was that school and education did not end after my college graduation!  

From typewriters, to word processors, to personal desktop computers, laptops, notebooks, and tablets, technology has been racing at warp speed as we try to keep up or catch up.  The latest generation hardly uses a writing machine – now they can type or speak into a smart phone and send things to a printer from there!  What’s next?  Only the techno wizards know.  But every so often...I get the urge to sit at a typewriter once more and see if how quickly and accurately I can type “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”.  How about you?