If you aren’t old enough to remember typewriters being in use

[raccoon]

I want you to know, we used to have to center our own TITLES.

This is how you did it:

Go to position 51 if your typewriter has elite type (12 char/inch) ; 42 if it has pica type (10 char/inch).

Backspace once for each two letters/numbers/spaces. For example, say your title is
“The Plethora of Pythons.” Here’s how you’d do it, maybe spelling out loud to yourself.

“Th—e space—pl—et—ho--ra--space o—f space—py—th—on.” (Forget the final S.)

Aren’t you glad you don’t have to do that?

[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. We used to need to know how to spell as well...

or at least how to use a dictionary.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

2. One Word: Footnotes!

Made irrelevant by modifications to academic styles (MLA, APA), thank goodness. What a pain in the neck THOSE were!

[ashling]

12. I loved footnotes!

OK, I hated trying to figure out how much room to leave on the page, etc,

but they were cool!

[Brother Buzz]

3. Typewriters, well many of them, didn't have a numeral "1"

you used the letter "l" instead. I find I occasionally still use the letter "l"; old habits are hard to break.

[logosoco]

62. And no exclaimtion point either !!111!!!11!11

We had to type an apostrophe and then back space and type a period!!!!!

[Brother Buzz]

63. Cool, I didn't know that

I learned to type in the Army Nuclear Surety Program; we NEVER used exclamation points!!!!!

[Ron Obvious]

65. No zero either...

You had to use the letter 'O'

[Brother Buzz]

67. That, too

I'm sketchy here, but I seem to remember using the capital, the uppercase letter 'O'.

[CBGLuthier]

4. Michael Nesmith got to stop being a Monkee because of what we had to do to make a correction

Do they even make Liquid Paper any more?

[progressoid]

9. Yes. We have a bottle of it somewhere in the house.

with that dried white stuff caked around the top.

[RILib]

35. Liquid Paper

I have some. I use it to correct my paper income tax returns if I make a mistake. I like organizing the heck out of my finances, use excel, etc. but nothing beats doing a tax return carefully with ink and paper to see what's what in the tax code and how to optimize.

[Bertha Venation]

47. How's that?

Michael Nesmith stopped being a Monkee because of white-out? o_O

[CBGLuthier]

51. His mother invented liquid paper

When Nesmith was 13, his mother invented a typewriter correction fluid later known commercially as Liquid Paper. Over the next 25 years she built the Liquid Paper Corporation into a multimillion dollar international company, which she finally sold to Gillette in 1979 for US $48 million. She died a few months later at age 56.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nesmith

[Bertha Venation]

55. God damn, she died young.

Thanks.

[hay rick]

69. Snopake.

Life before backspace and delete.

[RebelOne]

5. Remember that well.

I learned to type on a manual typewriter in high school.

[Brigid]

16. I remember those things.

Yep, those big old Underwood manual typewriters. I used to be fairly good on those. Probably not so much anymore.

[RebelOne]

25. If I had to type on one of those monsters nowadays,

I would probably break my fingers.

[ashling]

18. A big ole honkin Royal

when I graduated from HS my grandmother gave me one of these:


These came along later ... they were the BOMB!


http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/27/ibm-selectric-typewriter-turns-50-yells-at-tablets-to-get-off-i/

now when they make a computer keyboard with the touch/feel/sound of a selectric they will have something!

[hedgehog]

20. I've often wondered if the tiered keyboard is

better for the hands and wrists than the flat computer keyboard.

Does anyone recall what style key boards were on the old key punch machines? I should recall that, but I don't.

[RILib]

36. key punch

I don't remember the keyboard, but I do remember pulling bits of cards out from a jam.

[Brigid]

29. My high school got IBM Selectrics my senior year.

They were great!

P.S. The spell check on my smartphone doesn't even recognize the word "Selectric!"

[ashling]

41. Not very smart, is it?

[union_maid]

37. We had one just like that Royal

I wish we still did. Not to use it so much, but just to have around.

I still have to type sometimes at work. Just a little here and there, for certain kinds of forms that go to agencies that can't seem to move into the latter part of the last century. Those are all government agencies, of course.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

66. IIRC, a lot of early PC keyboards emulated the click-clack sound of the selectrics because users...

...wanted the aural feedback or their typing was thrown off.
You could turn the sound off or on as you pleased.

[uriel1972]

6. Typing classes were regarded

as being for under performing kids. How little did we know that computers would rule the world...

[Sekhmets Daughter]

17. Not in NYC

Everyone was required to take typing in 8th grade...college term papers you see.

[Xyzse]

7. I learned how to use a typewriter for fun.

It was the 80s, we also had computers at home that I played games in.

I couldn't figure out why we didn't have Karateka.

However, since I was a 6 year old that hung out with my grandfather's secretary, I learned how to type a bit.
It was also a point of pride between me and my older sister who could type faster.

So, yeah, we both hit over 50 wps before the age of 12 on the computer, but on the type writer, quite a bit slower.

[HarveyDarkey]

23. 50 wps?

Damn, that's fast

[Spike89]

52. On a selectric, 50 wps was good, not spectactular

We had a lab full of selectrics in high school. In the mandatory 1 term class, most of us got to 35-40+ wpm after adjusting for errors. I recall (dimly) pushing real hard to hit 50 wpm, but I couldn't get there. A couple classmates made it into the 60s. My Mom was a secretary and one of the fastest typists in town and she consistently could hit 90+ wpm error free. Even she is considerably slower on a computer keyboard.

I did spend some time in the early 80s selling computers, IBM XT clones mostly. The gold standard for keyboards were IBM branded and they were very close to the selectric in feel, sound, and build. Those noisy, heavy, high-travel keyboards seem to fall out of favor about the same time mice and graphical OSes arrived, I don't recall seeing many once WordPerfect fell from word processing dominance.

[HarveyDarkey]

53. wps or wpm?

[Spike89]

59. oops, wpm of course nt

[truegrit44]

71. I won a typing contest in 10th grade doing

70wpm. The coolest was the IBM Selectrics........weren't they the ones that had the little ball that rolled around?
Then there was one that had I think they called it a daisy wheel or something that you could switch to change font.
Now those were uptown!

[progressoid]

8. OMG. I forgot all about that.

Thanks for making me feel old.

[pipi_k]

10. bwaaaaa!!!

OMG I hated having to do that!!!

Then we had to set the margins, and if we were writing a business letter or something we had to try and center it on the entire page so there wasn't too much space at the bottom but also that there was room for the closing and the signature and, if necessary, "cc" or "enclosure".

Accuracy was a plus, as well. There was always white-out or the auto correction tape, but sometimes it looked pretty obvious.

And doing mimeograph was a nightmare.

[livetohike]

13. We had to use carbon paper if you wanted a copy

. Glad those days are over.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

19. Oh yeah...that stuff was wicked....

blue ink all over your hands and/or clothing. I really don't miss that!

[livetohike]

21. The correction tape....and you had to type the exact letter over it

that was in error, or else it wouldn't erase completely! So many frustrations while typing papers while in college. Just imagine how easy it would be today.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

22. I know...half the time...maybe less.

And we carried more hours...you were expected to graduate in 4 years, weren't considered a matriculating student with anything fewer than 16 hours per semester.

[livetohike]

31. That's right. I had 18 credit hours one semester and I was on the work-study

program, but I forget how many hours I had to work per week. I didn't have a car!! We didn't have cell phones! How did we exist

[Sekhmets Daughter]

32. I know...we were superhuman!

After my freshman year, I never carried fewer than 20 hours and usually 21. We didn't pay by the credit hour in those days, so I wanted my money's worth.

[dixiegrrrrl]

38. I hear ya...

Same situation...
I was hungry for knowledge I took 20 credit hours when I could and also had work study
plus 2 small kids
and no car
but a wondeful Selectric typewriter I kept on the kitchen table, banging away at it long into the night.
My kids tell me they remember falling asleep to the noise of the typewriter.

Typing now on the puter keyboard is much faster, tho.

[ashling]

42. Correction Tape ?!!

[livetohike]

43. That's a little fancy

I think it just came like a roll of adhesive tape and you ripped off a piece . However, like everything else about my physical body, the memory is shutting down .

[ashling]

44. I remember that

[Bertha Venation]

48. This is in the Smithsonian Sculpture Garden

It must be 15 feet tall

[frogmarch]

11. I'm sure old enough, and

I remember doing that!

This thread made me think of a letter my grandfather typed to his sister when he was a young attorney just starting out.

[livetohike]

14. What a great keepsake!

This is really cool...thanks for posting it

[ashling]

15. Remember making symbols by typing letters over each other

the symbol for "section" was S backspace s ... I don't remember any ohers. There was a way to make the copywrite symbol, but I don't remember it.

I wish I could do some of those on my computer.

[raccoon]

39. You could make the pound symbol (British pound) by typing capital L, backspacing, and typing "f". nt

[JeffHead]

24. Without typewriters we would have never had this classic.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

26. Oh, THANK YOU FOR THAT!

That was wonderful, LOL

I haven't seen it in ages.......wow.



His expressions are priceless!

[Brigid]

27. That was hilarious!!!

My teenage nieces and nephews would probably have no idea what is going on in this clip!

[lastlib]

28. Typed my senior thesis in college on an Underwood manual typewriter......

Four drafts--first was 64 pages w/ six pages of footnotes. Last three were just over one hundred pages, w/ eight pages of footnotes. After reviewing the second draft, my advisor made me lift about fifteen pages near the back and move them to a section nearer the front. Since it was for publication, I couldn't have ANY typos (or even anything that looked like it might've been a typo)--so basically, no corrections! I typed many pages 3 or 4 times, some even more. Altogether, I probably typed a thousand pages that last semester, and spent most of the time that I wasn't typing, with my hands soaking in ice water to get the swelling down.

I now have a touch of arthritis in my knuckles. To this day, I can't fully straighten my fingers without intense pain. Two weeks after I finished typing it, I got an IBM Selectric!

So this brings back a few nightmares for me!

[Manifestor_of_Light]

30. this is what I practiced on.Mom was dad's legal secretary.

I practiced on an IBM Executive, which had variable spacing, in 32nds of an inch. Mom got it in 1955 for $600, which was a lot of money. State of the art. I would sit on two phonebooks and type a perfect letter to my grandmother, when I was five years old.

Later I took typing in high school on a horrible old manual. I'm too fast to type on a manual.

In college I could do 82 WPM on an IBM Selectric, and still jam it up. Selectrics burp and print a hyphen when you type too fast.

I finally took a typing test on a computer that would not jam up. I typed 114 WPM, while going back and correcting my mistakes so it was perfect. That was about 1999.

Yeah, I'm a speed demon. I also took 12 years of piano lessons, and started those at age five. that is my secret.

Mine was green like the one in this ad:


I took a red IBM Standard with me to college. My roommates were horrified. A serious typewriter meant I was probably gonna study and type my own papers. Horrors, she's gonna study!!

[Art_from_Ark]

33. I almost had to use a typewriter to write my thesis,

but just before I was set to start writing it, my department installed a bunch of MS-DOS desktops that were equipped with a ground-breaking technology called Word Perfect. Whew.

[RILib]

34. organize

And you had to organize your thoughts and outline your paper before writing, to minimize typing again. The loss of that process is probably part of the decline and fall of general intelligence.

[pink-o]

40. I remember the first time I ever used a word processing program.

It was in 1981 on a CRT green screen. The guy who showed me almost got lucky that night, I was so excited! Up to that point, we would write papers, essays, short stories et al with a pencil, edit them, then type them up into immutable, documents. They may as well have been stone tablets. Word processing was the first time we not only threw away the correction and carbon copies, but we also were able to change and edit what we wrote.

A few months later, I gave my IBM daisy-wheel typewriter to the Goodwill, and never looked back.

[Orrex]

45. I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me at the time, but...

My typing classes in high school have turned out to be among the most useful lessons of my entire educational experience, probably ranking up there with reading and math.

The classes themselves were drudgery, with preposterous attention paid to the minutiae of technique ("No, Orrex, you have to use your right thumb on the space bar!"), but it's a skill that I've used almost every day in the past 20+ years.


And, if nothing else, I love the fact that my old-school typing instruction predisposes me to bitter arguments with people who shriek in horror at the idea that two spaces should follow a period.

[laundry_queen]

68. yes, I agree.

Although we took 'typing' classes, at the time they were on a keyboard and some word processing program. We were still made to do 2 spaces after a period and so on.

I learned SO much because for the first half of the year we had an instructor that said speed was more important than correcting mistakes because our fingers would eventually get good at knowing where the keys were. THEN she went on leave, and a new teacher came in that had the opposite philosophy - that it was most important to get it right the first time and eventually we would build up speed. That was a turn around, and it was hard to adjust, but looking back I had the best of both worlds, because I learned how to be fast and accurate.

They don't even offer the class in my old high school anymore (my daughter goes there). I think kids now just grow up typing, LOL. It's second nature for them.

I do remember my mom had a computerized IBM typewriter she got from her work when they switched over to computers. I did a few papers on that thing in my first year of University. It wasn't too bad because it had auto-erase .

[LiberalEsto]

46. I got a D in typing class back in 8th grade

and told my teacher I didn't plan to type for a living.

I ended up in the newspaper business and became the fastest two-finger typist my colleagues had ever seen.

Life's little ironies.

[Ptah]

49. Where's Heidi or CMW?

[mainer]

50. Remember carbon paper? Changing typewriter ribbons?

I still have my little portable manual, which I keep just for old time's sake. No idea where I'd find typewriter ribbons for it.

[bananas]

54. Remember mimeographs and ditto machines?

http://glasspetalsmoke.blogspot.com/2007/07/perfume-of-mimeographs.html

http://wisdomofhands.blogspot.com/2009/05/remember-mimeograph.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator

[mainer]

56. I used to like the smell of mimeograph ink

Even up till the 1980s, some schools were still using those machines.

[Brother Buzz]

64. Mimeograph ink was rather boring in my mind

Now, the solvent used in making Ditto copies is another story....

[hay rick]

70. As soon as I saw the word I remembered the smell.

I still occasionally refer to copies as mimeographs. Younger people don't have a clue what I meant to say...

[madrchsod]

60. i used a mimeograph machine for my underground newspaper...

state of the art in 68. the big plus it was dirt cheap and the chemicals made ya higher.

[Curmudgeoness]

57. I don't remember any of those things......

well, I lie. I started typing in 9th grade, my first "real" job after I graduated was a clerk/typist. In 1971. No computers. No correction tape. No liquid paper. Spellcheck was called a dictionary.

Those were the good old days.

[geardaddy]

58. I remember that. n/t

And typing class. Do they even have that anymore in high school?

[Aristus]

61. If you're old-school, I respect that.

But, damn! I fucking hated manual typewriters! On some of them, if you pressed a key too hard, the associated momentum, or sympathic vibration, or whatever, would cause the space key to depress on its own at the same time. That frequently messed up whatever I was typing...

[Honeycombe8]

72. I remember, Raccoon! I had forgotten, but now I remember. Oy veh...can you believe

we did that?

[krispos42]

73. We still use one at work

For typing information on serial number stickers. And they sometimes fill out forms or something, too.



Hell, we still have a couple of dot-matrix printers, the wide ones, for printing out POs on the (thankfully) carbonless copy sheets. Tractor feed.

[nolabear]

74. A couple of years ago we took typewriters to a children's festival.

I was teaching poetry writing and we quickly found out that even the most reluctant kids would write like mad on typewriters. They were just fascinated by them, and their parents got a kick out of seeing them bang away. We would always softly caution the parents not to explain things to them so they could get a kick out of seeing them get to the end of the first line and look around, trying to find the "Enter" key. Once we gave them permission to whang away at that return lever they had a blast!

And we got some pretty good poems!

[DearHeart]

75. I miss the sound of typewriters!

Keyboards nowadays just don't have any sound to them.