As a long time collector of junk (who else has a box of cola can sized 5000uF capacitors?) I was delighted this weekend to get my hands on some old mechanical typewriters, the kind of which I haven't used for absolutely years.
I was interested to note after doing a little research that Olivetti still makes mechanical typewriters, and such items are still commonly used in countries and areas where electricity is not available to power word processors and computers. As with so many things in the 21st century, they are also used by people who just like that 'retro' appeal -- probably the same kind of person that has one of the old grey Post Office telephones.
As a sign of how quickly things move these days, they were of course ubiquitous until the late 1980's, whereup they started to get replaced by computers. Do you for instance remember all those ladies with typewriters sitting in the background on BBC TV's grandstand? I even have a copy of some (very) old bank statements from Barclays bank that were manually produced on a typewriter.
One very quickly gets used to the difference required to press the keys on a mechnical typewriter compared to a modern keyboard (he says, hammering the keys on his Dell). Of course, the lack of a carriage return key is initially an impediment to continuing to the next line (it's actually a lever to the left of the platen), and the missing 1 key is quickly replaced with the lower case L.
Typewriters, whilst obsolete, provide us with many terms that have followed through to computing, the tab key (from the mechnical tabulator on early typewriters), carriage return, line feed, carbon copy and of course the QWERTY keyboard layout.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go clean my hands, they got a little dirty changing the ink ribbon.
In the meanwhile I leave you with Leroy Anderson's 'The Typewriter', as far as I know the only piece of music for Orchestra and uh, well, a typewriter.
