I Miss Using A Typewriter

As I type this message with the small buttons on my keyboard, I can't help but notice that it just doesn't have the same feel of applying force and momentum to press the cold steel keys that activate a lever to launch a metal bar, compressing into the paper coiled up in front of you. It is a long forgotten feeling; it required no electricity, and it was all mechanical and human powered. And there is something to be said about the aesthetics of a document typed with a typewriter. With the varying line widths and sizes of each letter and number, depending on how hard you pressed the key on a typewriter. Because of this, no two letters you typed onto your document looked identical. A typewriter written document has much more character than any document with perfectly manufactured letters typed on a laptop and sent out of a laser jet printer.

Sure it's a lot more convenient to have a backspace key, and the ability to quickly edit a word document. I'm sure many of you never wanna go back to the dark ages of typing without making any mistakes and embrace the keyboard that lays before your fingertips. Why revert back to an inferior device with fewer capabilities? There are many people younger than me who never got the chance to ever experience using one. As soon as my family got our first printer for our primitive McIntosh more than 20 years ago, my parents gave me their typewriter to play with as a toy.

My grandfather probably had the last typewriter models that were ever made. I remember his had a primitive LCD screen where he could type a few words and review them for typos before the computer typed and processed them onto the paper. My parents and I tried really hard to get him into using a PC, but he was a technophobe and just couldn't pull himself to adapt to it.

 

I don't recall ever using one but I remember them being loud and kind of annoying.

 

My first memories of typewriters was one similar to this that belonged to my grandfather. He got in the '20's I think. It had a hard carrying case that just fit over it and fasted to the base.



Everything I turned in for college was banged out on a typewriter.

remember how there would always be one letter that would hit harder and cut through the paper a little

 

i never seriously used a typewriter. my mom had one when i was really young, and i played on it a little bit, even then it seemed like more effort than it was worth.

when i had typing class in 7th grade, we used word processing machines, which sound exactly like this:

i don't really remember anything about that though. actual computers started to take off around that time, so these machines disappeared and i pretty much forgot they existed.

 

^
Yeah it was basically a poor man's computer at the time. Seemed ideal for folks like my granddad who were stubborn to move onto superior technologies.

I kinda liked the sound they made.

*Tap tap tap tap tap tap Ding, tap tap tap tap tap Ding*

 

My grandparents had one and I remember as a child we would use it to create stories. Well really it was just me writing. I used to read Goosebumps and had all the books before selling them on eBay for $25. Wahhhh!! I used to try and write my own scary novels. I don't think I got very far.

 

For the "too loud" comment cmon we all know several people who mash their keyboard like they're hitting home runs and shit.

 

I remember they were heavy as fuck

 

it was hard to draw pictures with them when that was all we had.

i know that must sound silly, but for the first half of my life, i really looked forward to the day,
starting in the late 70s, when ordinary people could afford to have their own computers.

 

They're still around. Apparently you're not the only one.

 

a lot of published authors still swear by them. many of the rest swear at them.

 

Personally I don’t miss the typewriter. We always had a typewriter around the house first mechanical then an electric,
but I didn't really care for then because just one mistake and it was back to the drawing board.

So I embraced WordPerfect before moving onto Microsoft Word


Hotwater

 

where my dad worked in all the little stations and switch towers there was always at least one.

that's why i mentioned having wished i could draw pictures on/with them.

which you actually sort of could in a couple of ways.

anybody remember wordstar under cp/m?

it was so rube goldberg it made those programable self correcting typewriters remain competitive with early apple II's and trasher 80s.

 

I miss typewriters. During the years, I've probably typed on every kind there is...from the old old kind that weighed at least 50 pounds to the "newer" manuals to the selectric (and any in between).

I love the loud sound, and even more than that sound, I love the feel of MASHING the keys. Since I play piano, the feel of tapping, HARD, those keys was similar.

On my laptop, I still tap it way too hard...at least according to my son I do. lol

He has let me play on his tablet when I've visited at his house...and I even tap the screen too hard (he says). He has asked me WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!??? I just

I really like tapping those keys with some force behind it...and I miss my desk top computer that had the actual separate keyboard. Those keys needed more oomph than these little flat keys that literally require no finger strength. However, I can't help hitting these harder than I absolutely need to.

 

well i did learn qwerty on some of the first electrics and the old mechanicals. (this was in the early 70s, right around 70/71, and we didn't have ready to run pc's yet.
there were altair, later imsi and osi kits, and the s-100 bus, but it wasn't until 77 you could get anything in a store you didn't have to build from a kit)
never could get up to any kind of speed, until little personal computers came along though, and then modems and bbs's.

took forever for me to break the 20 wpm barrier, and never did go beyond 55 until modeming with early pc's came along.

 

My dad had one during the war.
And he was a journalist.
He would let my sister and me use it, and we would make our own newspapers.
Good times.
Well, minus the war.

I don't mind the sound it makes. In fact, I quite like it.

 

My brother is a good bit older than me, he lived at home throughout college and i remember he would type his papers on a typewriter into the late hours of the night. The noise drove me nuts but i'm kinda crazy about certain sounds anyways.

My family bought a computer when i was in 6th grade so I never had to do any school assignments on the typewriter but I do remember playing around with it

I think it would be fun to own one now for creative writing but i cant imagine having to use one for school or anything. I remember my poor brother having to retype whole pages beause of a couple of typos, or struggling with the white out and realigning everything to retype one letter.

 

I typed all of my (many) college papers on an old manual...the oldest typewriter in the world, it seemed. It got the job done though.

I also remember when the white correction tape came out...you could slide a itty piece of that white correction tape right there at the mistake, lightly strike the key/paper, and it was like MAGIC...mistake gone!!!

There was also a type of typing paper I discovered in my senior year that you could erase (with the correct type of eraser!) the mistake! It wasn't onion skin paper but it was similar.

We still have 2 old OLD manual typewriters around here...but unless there was some type of emergency I cannot imagine I won't be using them any time soon. lol