Last typewriter factory in the world shuts its doors

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

When my daughter was about 10, some years ago now, she saw her first
manual typewriter.

"Dad!" she says in great excitement, "This is great. You just put in some
paper and then you hit the key and then it prints immediately! You don't
need a computer!"

I had to spoil the moment by asking "Yeah, sure. Show me how you make a
correction." (In fact, that typewriter had built in correcting white tape
that was invoked with backspacing.)

Years ago, as word processing was just becoming available, I was espousing
the benefits to a grizzled editor at Maclean-Hunter. "You can move
paragraphs!" I told him. "Peter," he says, "I have never moved a goddamn
paragraph in my life." (He probably moved them around while still in his
wetware RAM.)

More recently, I was over at the Harbord Bakery and Raffi, the owner,
showed me a nice little manual typewriter he had found. He said he
intended to use it for multi-part forms.

I actually owned an electric Smith Corona typewriter where the keys had
been rearranged to suit the Dvorak keyboard. When word processing came
along, I ditched it at Goodwill. I wonder if anyone else ever figured it
out what was going on. Maybe they could have used it as an encrypting
device. Then I rewired, by hand, using #30 wire wrap wire, an entire
Commodore PET keyboard to the Dvorak layout. Man, was I happy when the
Dvorak layout could be done in software.

Peter

> William Park wrote:
>> Typewriter manufacturers should have re-designed it to function with
>> computer,
>> rather than as competing and independent device.
> It's been done!
> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IBM_Selectric
>
> The Selectric typewriter was modified to create a computer terminal.
> You'd often see them used by bank tellers.
>
> Also, back in the mid '70s, there were plenty of schemes to use
> typewriters as computer terminals.
>
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-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
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