I learned to type on one of those. I wholeheartedly embraced computers when they came along, but there are times I still kind of miss typewriters.
There is a certain 'Earthy' feel to them. But possibly that descriptor only fit mine, rather than yours: my first typewriter was an old fully-manual one where the force of the fingers did all the work of making the impressions (don't remember name or even brand... but I'd recognize it if I saw one). I was VERY quick at 'hunting-and-pecking' because I typed so much. I got a Selectric maybe a decade later. But I finally learned to touch type on an IBM PC ([c.1987] 8086 processor? I know it had a WHOPPING 20MB hard drive in it)!
I know the feeling. I had a manual typewriter as a teenager and I wrote a lot of letters on it (I had a lot of pen pals). The manual typewriter was an improvement over writing things out long hand, since it saved on hand cramps, but the electric typewriter I used at school was (as you noted) a HUGE improvement over the manual typewriter. I just kind of fell in love with the electric typewriter then because it was so much easier to use.
Computers were in use in the early 80s in offices, but they were mostly (if not all) MS-DOS based and not practical for home use or easy to use for word processing programs. They were an improvement over typewriters, though, because you didn't have to retype a document to make corrections.
Then Mac came along in the late 80s and blew everything out of the water.
Topic: The Awesome Pictures Thread (Read 532723 times)
