Category: Henoed

Okay, this is just pure comedy gold. Even moreso if, having gotten used to working on a computer, you've gone back and used a typewriter for anything more complex than an envelope.

I started my typing career in high school, using of the portables my parents still had from their college days. We had these old massive electric typewriters for typing class, but that was as close as I got to something powered in my high school career.

For graduation, though, my folks gave me a spiffy Smith-Corona electric. Not only was it electric, but it had removable cartridges — a normal ribbon, a use-once "film" ribbon for nicer typing, and, mirabile dictu, a correction cartridge.

(You know all those movies where the cool hero is slicker-than-shit fast in popping and reloading the magazines on their pistols? That was me with the correction cartridge on my Smith-Corona.)

Whilst in college, I typed most of my papers, except for my senior thesis (which I hired one of the local typing services — now there's a niche industry that's largely vanished — to type for me).  But in my senior year, the campus computer centers began to have 8.5" wide (after the strips were torn off) tractor feed 9-pin dot-matrix printers — which meant you could, in theory, type papers into the word processing software text editor and print them off that way. Assuming your teacher allowed it. Which many did not (esp. in the History Department).

In fact, I was so intrigued by that use of the IBM mainframe, that I wrote a series of help files and macros for use with the EDGARD, then XEDIT text editor to help folks write their papers with them.

Which was a major reason I ended up working in the IT realm for the rest of my life. Go figure.

(The college mainframe did have a word processing package — or, rather, a markup language, Waterloo Script, for the text editor, and a Spinwriter "nice" printer — but all that was only available to the faculty, and kept locked up in the computer room.)

Anyway, typewriters. Fun!