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| I had one like this upon which I typed a gazillion words. |
Anybody old enough remembers what a terrible experience it was to make corrections on a piece of typed material. What about the hassle of typing columns? And, my God, discovering that you had left something out of a multi-paged document. Well, that was grounds for suicide. I think of all those other accouterments that went along with typewriters. Remember erasable bond paper? (You can still get it from Amazon.) Remember the special erasers? Remember correction tape? Onion-skin paper? Carbon paper? Remember those fancy and expensive typewriters that had "auto-correction"? And do you remember how LOUD those things were?
George Harrison says it: "All Things Must Pass." But not without a sad face sometimes.
UUpdate I: Gawker is reporting that there are still manufacturers in China, Japan and Indonesia making typewriters.
2 comments:
Remember the smell of your tests when they came off the mimeograph machine? Sometimes those purple and white pages were still wet; I wonder if the poor teacher was re-typing pages on her old Smith-Corona. RIP indeed. They saved millions of trees in their day; we create billions of pounds of waste paper today because of the ease of modern technology.
I do indeed remember that smell, and the stencils necessary to allow the ditto machine to do its thing. I know dealing with these things had to be a supreme hassle for teachers. Yet another thing that more or less marks us as coming from another planet.
The paper at least degrades. Did you see my blog entry on plastic? That's what's really horrifying.
Thanks for alerting me to this story, Mare.
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