Seen sitting in every corner of every office. The humble typewriter.
Production is going to stop at the last factory in the world.
News article

As I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter (sometimes with caps over the keys so you couldn't cheat by looking at the keyboard) I already feel like a museum piece without having to read news items like this one.

Shush, stop voicing what I was thinking.

Rosemary

I say bring back the flint chip!

Fish n chips will suit me.

Graham

Don't you find it amusing that we have gone from silicon as in flint, and back again to silicon as in computer chips?

I don't quite understand the title "What is Spain going to do now".

Since computers and associated electronic equipment became commonplace in offices and other workplaces, they have been absolutely revelling in it, churning out printed papers in triplicate,quadruplicate and by the truck load, wherever they could find even the most remote reason for doing so.

Has anyone noticed that the Spanish seem to have crap printers, they are always faded or not in line.

Dick,,,,have you never noticed that lone typewriter sitting in every office. Banks, doctors reception desk, tax office, council offices etc etc. I have even seen some being used. They print off a form or have some triplcate ones then sit there and type out the information into the relevant boxes on the forms.

So they are only there to con the punters into believing they still do some serious work ?

And being the catalyst for chips on this thread may I just say that using a flint creates a spark, a sparky is an electrician and I served my time as an apprentice electrician.
How tenuous can that be.

Graham

It's more than sensible to have a typewriter as a back-up in every office. Computers and printers fail all the time, and even if they're working, they send all our information straight to Bill Gates and China.

I recently watched a funcinario thread some paper into an old typewriter and laboriously type out some personal details of mine. It may have been frustrating to watch, but I knew that those details would not be on Facebook ten minutes later.

Except nobody wants to use them anymore, and the only one left using it is the office tea boy.

Me too - and I still talk about carriage returns.

Oh yes, and the agony of making a mistake and having to try to erase it with one of those pencil type erasers without making a hole in the paper! And, in the days before photocopiers, multiple carbon copies and those horrible Gestetner duplicators where you used to get covered in ink! I sound about 104 instead of 54.

In fact I am even more of a dinosaur as I was one of the last generation who was taught Pitman shorthand - I still have my RSA 140 wpm certificate somewhere!

I can't understand the misgivings employers have about taking on people in their 50s and older, saying they don't cope well with change, when you think of the enormous amount of technological advances in the workplace people of those generations have coped with over the last 40 years. I remember being told that all this 'new technology' would mean vast amounts of increased leisure time for all of us - where did it all go wrong, when it seems that most people nowadays are 'at work' virtually 24/7 and can never switch off their mobile phones and Blackberries.