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Via Metafilter, where someone bemoans the lack of simulation of the keys jamming when you hit 2 at the same time.
August 2, 2015
Relive the old-time frustration of typing on a real typewriter.
Here. I did:
Click to enlarge.
Via Metafilter, where someone bemoans the lack of simulation of the keys jamming when you hit 2 at the same time.
Click to enlarge.
Via Metafilter, where someone bemoans the lack of simulation of the keys jamming when you hit 2 at the same time.
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36 comments:
Typewriters never gave you "Of coyote".
Try an electric with correct tape erasure feature...oh, never mind.
In my personal typing class (as opposed to business typing), a strike-over on a paper was an automatic F. (circa 1968)
As an aside, you can type the word "typewriter" without leaving the top row of keys. But then everybody knows that.
Piano practice helps.
My 10-year old got an old typewriter for Christmas and furiously types funny short stories, with cute typos and misspellings.
So, how does that show up in the productivity and standard-of-living statistics?
Thier are definate raesons why these thigns are in my paste.
My mother could type my high school papers at my normal speaking rate with no errors. She was amazing. That was 60 years ago.
New typewriters might help.
I took a manual typewriter with me to college in 1983, and typed at least half a dozen twenty page papers with it.
The Best Prurient Material came from manual typewriters.
Passion, double-strikes, mistakes, off-angle, scribbled side-notes : the fever was there on the paper.
You could FEEL each strike on the paper.
Writing a hot letter in the era of Word is just vocabulary: you never even sense the sweaty fingers, the sweaty lip, the sweaty passionate Capitalization: your Passion has been drily Auto-Corrected.
One day Lovers might have to resort to Pen.
I am Laslo.
I second the comment that piano lessons help. When I hit high school typing many many moons ago, I'd already had 10 years of fairly intense piano lessons. The main lesson that carried over was "don't look at the keys or your hands. My speed was good but my error rate was phenomenal -- zero at times. That skill got me my first "real" job setting type at a newspaper. Later I set type at a printing company and really learned about fonts and kerning.
The things that irritate me about eprint books are the badly chosen fonts, kerning, and typos. Advanced age, arthritis, and tremors ensure I'll not go back to print books though. Ever tried to 'pinch to zoom' or 'doubletap' to get larger print on a paperback? Embarrassing if you get caught doing it.
I wrote my first NIH grant (successful, I might add) longhand and a secretary typed it up. You were just more careful when correcting things was much harder. No biggee.
There are a billion typewriter stories out there, this is one of mine.
I found this old typewriter in the dumpster in like 1993. I mean it had
to be old. And I played around with it and got it working ok. I mean gawd knows
how old the ribbon was. I was on the Board of this card club and the secretary
couldn't be there for a BOD meeting so I offered to take the minutes.
And I typed them up on the old typewriter. Next meeting everyone eyes the old
minutes and noone says anything except this one woman who was like an office
manager and probably an ex hot shot secretary or something and after giving it a
good eyeover asks in a not approving manner "what was this typed on." Here's the
thing, whatever you're typing on now imagine some fool can still use it 90 years
from now.
Love it!. That's nice.
Did a lot of work on a couple of manual portables I had. Repaired IBM Selectrics for a few years. Cheap daisy wheel machines were the worst.
With the Selectric the character ball was positioned by tilt and rotate tapes and a clutch then hammered the wheel forward. Equal time between key-press and ball hit for all letters. With daisy wheel machines the time between key-press and sound of hammer hit depended on how long it took to spin the wheel into position. I found the asynchronous thwapping very disturbing.
"fading fast"
Could be a new tag.
Nice typewriter simulator there, Chief. Now do one for a log log decitrig slipstick. That'll keep ya busy for a while.
I've used the log log slipstick. And took typing in high school on a manual machine where an error counted ten words off your speed. Wish today's journalists had learned that degree of accuracy.
etbass, a good modern typist corrects errors in real time without looking at the keys or the screen. The fingers know what's going on.
This was obviously not done on an IBM Correcting Selectric II, which was the perfection of the analog typewriter, and which made it impossible to jam two keystrokes together.
I bought one in law school direct from IBM. Spent two years after graduation paying for it. My fellow law review editors envied it. I turned out correspondence on it -- imploring full professors at prestigious law schools to write book reviews for the Texas Law Review -- that were indistinguishable from modern computer- and word-processor-created letters, flawless and pristine, which in turn reassured said full professors that their manuscripts would be buffed and polished to similar perfection.
This is a crappy effort, albeit with the excuse that it's unpracticed; even a manual Underwood in skilled hands could, and should, do much better.
My father, aboard a vessel of the U.S. Navy during WW2 in the Pacific, did something which I think was heroic, but which the Regular Navy commanding officer of his ship thought at the time was a court-martial offense. (Long story; I told it as part of my dad's eulogy at his funeral.)
What saved my father from said court martial was that he was a February 1944 graduate of the B.B.A./NROTC program at UT-Austin, at which he'd learned to touch-type and compose workmanlike business correspondence, which in the Navy translated into flawlessly typed reports that made his C.O. look competent. My father's typing skills literally saved him from spending the rest of the war in the brig.
I don't know who programmed that simulator, but it is a lousy simulator: It does not reproduce typing on even a very poor, very clunky, manual typewriter.
I write this -- "keyboard" it, as my kids would say -- having learned to touch-type on a manual standing Underwood that pre-dated WW2, and that performed much, much better than this dishonest piece of software simulation. Whatever the programmer built into the code to try to simulate the action of a mechanical analog typewriter is WAY off base.
Two (very swift and agile) thumbs down.
Beldar, one of the various qualities that made the IBM typewriters and then the PC leap to the top in business micro-computers was the tactile keyboard. It clicked when you pushed it, and you could feel that click under the finger.
As you note, the Selectrics avoided jamming cleverly by having one typing head that was faster than the typist. Pretty amazing technology.
And now we have touch-screens on 2" X 3" QWERTY keyboards. We're going backward.
Thank God for typewriters, since my handwriting was and is awful. I went through the last two years of college and law school with a Smith Corona electric portable. It had key arms not a spinning ball but it was very sturdy. It also made this wonderful hum. I had thought the typing class they made us take in high school was the stupidest idea possible, but it turned out to have been very important.
I started law practice well before the advent of the computer, and I quickly learned to dictate my first drafts. Oh that was wonderful. But more wonderful were the typists and secretaries we had. Angels from heaven. They were fast and the best of them (most were best or near best) made amazingly few mistakes. And they put up with us, usually with good humor.
Reminds me of a funny Letterman show in his NBC days. A contest over who can type the balk rule the fastest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NndiiezGkNY
The police were always able to line up the typewriter with the ransom note.
Make the victim write the ransom note.
I am Laslo.
Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...
Nice typewriter simulator there, Chief. Now do one for a log log decitrig slipstick. That'll keep ya busy for a while.
I was at a table of engineers having lunch a month or two back and mentioned slide rules. Only one, who is an older guy like me, even knew what one is. He is not quite as old as me so had never used one.
I pulled up a picture of one on my phone and everybody was amazed that anything at all could be designed with one.
KC Boxbottom www.changeover.com/boxbottom.html just put a video about slide rules on YouTube that I call "The case of the slippery stick":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ8dRQEvEC4
Batch it to see why I think slide rules still rule and should still be taught in school.
John Henry
Watch it, not batch it.
I used to type my papers up a paragraph at a time, which was about all I could reasonably type without needing revision. Then I would cut them up and paste them together and photocopy the final result.
I felt like quite the genius.
I was probably one of the last cohorts of students who used a slide rule as a matter of course. Professors allowed slide-rule accuracy in answers, Texas Instruments calculators with the big bright red LED displays were available, but $75 dollars was more than a month's rent. Possibly, IIRC, equivalent to the cost of a couple of credit hours.
I loved it though. It was like a game by itself. I would say that every student should learn to use one, but honestly, learning Matlab is probably a better use of their time.
I took typing in high school and got an "A" every report card. In college, I had classes where we had to write in class and were required to compose on the typewriter. (The classrooms did have IBM selectrics.) Composing on the typewriter--rather than merely transcribing from a hand-written draft--felt awkward at first, but I quickly got the hang of it.
Now, I suppose that's what everyone does...except for those professional writers who still prefer to compose their drafts by hand. (Those who do say that the slower pace of writing by hand, as well as the neuronal connection between brain and hand, allows them to be more considered in their writing, whereas they find typing encourages the rapid recording of first thoughts, which are usually--contra Jack Kerouac--not good.)
I miss the smell of the typewriter ink. That and dittos.
Yes, but does anyone remember coin-operated typewriters?
Insert a quarter, and a timer starts going tick-tick-tick. When the time runs out, something goes "clunk," and the typebars can no longer reach the paper.
Yes, there were such things. Simulate that.
Does it have superscript and subscript fonts?
My dad had an electric. Even though there were computers at school already, there weren't enough. They were kept in the lab and so I still learned on some ancient typewriters. To this day I have to refrain from touching the keys too harshly; I had to relearn that uber soft touch for iPads that anyone under 30 is born with. My mother still bashes away on her laptop.
The positive was that all the markings on the keys had been removed on the training typewriters so I never have to look as long as it is qwerty.
Little kids love mechanical typewriters, btw. They think it is fun that it appears immediately without having to print and has all those movable parts. Plus they can bash on it.
Typing class wasn't the problem. The problem was the football player who discovered I was very ticklish, and smart enough to wait him out after class.
The biggest problem with this simulator is that it will omit letters you type, but still make the keystrike sound for them. On a real typewriter the sound is quite different if you press one key too quickly after another key. That lets you fix the problem before you type further.
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