Fredbargate

Two articles from today's news

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/britain-s-l...e20112012.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20395212

Lynn R

I wish you wouldn't post articles like this - it makes me feel like a museum piece myself! I learned touch typing on a manual typewriter (with caps on the keys so you couldn't cheat by looking at the keyboard) and we also had to type in rythm to music (the William Tell Overture, of all things). I still can't hear that without bursting out laughing.

After a couple of years working I remember electric typewriters being introduced, and when I was later given an Adler golfball selectric typewriter I thought I was the bee's knees.

Fredbargate

Lynn what made me post it was my amazement that typewriters were still in production or not as the article suggests

Domino

S N A P !!

At 16 learnt touch typing on an old Imperial sit up and beg style, initially with the keys uncovered by after a few weeks we moved on to the other classrooms that had covers over the letters.
William Tell ?? There's posh for you - we had Chief Petty Officer Dan Maskell who beat the time on the desk with a shillaly. And he was uncanny, he knew which typist was early or late and you got your knuckles rapped.
We then moved on to merging our morse code training with typing and started to type the morse on to the typewriter.
Can still do close to my maximum of 50wpm.

moved on to Creed 7b teleprinters fitted with a 5 unit code punch tape machine. Also remember a Type 21 (?) a flat bed machine that was used on secure networks and telex, fitted with the "who is" key which gave a semi-secure confirmation used by banks for money transfers.

You weren't too posh, only having an Adler - the real bee's knees was the IBM golf ball. I believe this was developed from the print mechanism of the Creed 7b which used a golf ball print head back in 1968. Saw one of these fly through the air when the securing pin snapped, made a nasty mess of the plastic cover over the top.

The kids of today would laugh at all this, but it is in very recent memory, most medium to large companies had a telex if they did international and it was only the Postal Strike in 1981 that got people thinking about alternative methods, hence the boom in fax machines (a British invention for another time)

The memories , including having to fiddle the carbon copy of the secure teleprinter circuit due to too much chatting to wrens on the night shift.

rgds

Domino

Interesting they don't mention in passing the LEO computer which did the accounting for Lyons Tea Houses.

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Domino

and if your computers, phones and associated equipment are knocked out by the EMP from a nuclear device how will you communicate ?

wonder if there are stockpiles of typewriters and carbon paper in strategic places - like the caves of Gibraltar.?

surely the typewriter is still holding its own in many 3rd World countries where there isnt any electricity.

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whitelinen

Smoke signals, a pocket heliograph or pencil and back of a fag packet is all anyone will need.

Typewriter ribbons dry out.

Fredbargate

Plus a pigeon

Domino

well pushing the boundaries, but many on this forum will remember the Gestetner/Roneo onion skin printing systems which didnt use the ribbon as they required the typewriter in stencil mode.

heliograph may be fine if there is sun, wondering how you can make fags and their packets with all the online control systems shot to buggery.

now pigeons, used extensively in WWI and also in certain areas of WWII, so long as we can keep the food growing.

Remember that the StoneAge option will be followed by the Nuclear (Long) Winter that will make the Dark Ages look like a summer holiday.
So, all those who are squirreling, hiding in case the BH finds it, or running museums could be the only way we would be able to communicate.

Having grown up on the son of Enigma I will probably have to remember how to use one time pads, but as they need to be printed (usually) so perhaps it should be even earlier with the Caesar Code.

When you look back, it is only a short time since all these "old" things were in daily use, so things like the Cold War and Space Race have given us so much.
Even the GPS products hang their hat on the original Polaris programme of the 1960's, which is much closer to WWI than to today.

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Lynn R

Oh please, don't go there! I remember that awful pink correcting fluid for Gestetner stencils that didn't actually work, so if you got almost to the end of a long document and made a mistake you had to start all over again. And every time I tried to use the duplicator I ended up with ink up to the elbows - machinery and me just don't mix.

And those pencil type erasers for rubbing out typing errors that rubbed a hole in the paper as often as not, and you had to remember to put a sheet of paper underneath the carbon paper if you were making copies so as not to smudge the copies.

These youngsters don't know they're born!

Rosemary

Oh please, stop, this brings back all the horrors of my first job in an office. Your earlier post about the typewriters too. So much easier now, no-one can tell how many times you have typed and re-typed a message or letter before the final piece is viewed.

Rosemary

kimilseung

I too was amazed that they still made them.

Not sure that such places exist. No electricity is very rare these days, such places would be back-of-beyond rural and probably no need for typing. But I would be surprised that places like Indian local government didn't still use them, the mix of red tape obsession and chance to save some money.

A lot of developing countries seem to have skipped some steps of development, mobile phones being one example.

Domino

and they get more consistant reception where here we are still having difficulties.

doesn't alot of Indian admin still use hand written chitties ?

when I send letters back to UK the local correos print off the receipt on an odd shaped piece of paper then labouriously cut the receipt out with a pair of scissors.
3rd World ??

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Rambling Rose

Remember 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog'?

What seems funny now is how hard some people found it to adapt to wordprocessors when they came along. I remember a big debate about whether to buy Wangs and Apples for the office.

I thought Dom would have mentioned smoke signals and semaphore. We used both when I was a girl guide.

montgomail

Not wishing to boast but I was pretty nifty on the telex machine .. never bothered with the tape, just typed my message "live".