End of the line: the typewriter takes a bow

Typewriters bring back lots of memories. Despite being of the computer generation, I was still just young enough that we didn’t have a computer in our house until I was about 12, and then I rarely got to use it because my Mum was studying or my brother and sister playing computer games. Instead, I had a fabulous electronic typewriter which my Gran gave me, as she didn’t need it any more. One summer holiday I spent the entire six weeks shut in my room writing what I thought was a novel. Reading it today it was more like ‘a pile of rubbish’ but still – I loved that typewriter, and that six weeks spent on it taught me to speed-type pretty effectively! There’s also something incredibly satisfying about hearing a big loud ‘clack’ when you press a key (mine had two settings – one where it would type in time and one where you could store a certain amount of text and it would print the whole line when you reached the end). I wonder if, these days, you can get a ‘typewriter app’ for tablets and phones, that will emit the ‘clack’ sound every time you press a key =)

I bought myself a Smith Corona electric portable typewriter in the 1970s and soon taught myself to touch type with the help of a 50p paperback. That made it very easy to type on computer keyboards such as an RM 380Z and a BBC B, and I could even do a passable effort at touch typing on a Sinclair Spectrum with rubber keys.

I am very surprised that we still have the QWERTY keyboard, which is reputed to have been developed to slow down typists so that typewriter typebars do not jam.

I remember using an IBM Executive typewriter in the 1970s. Unlike other contemporary typewriters it would do proportional spaced text, which seemed incredibly clever at the time.

Then there were golf ball typewriters, allowing a choice of fonts and finally daisy wheel printers that would produce characters that are more sharply defined than any laser printer I have seen.

Perhaps the most impressive invention was the introduction of lift-off tape to remove mistakes, because even the best typist makes mistakes. Since I was not a perfect typist, moving to a computer was a logical step.

Electric typewriters are easy to touch-type on but I have a lot of respect for those who mastered the skill on a mechanical typewriters, where the keys must be depressed much further.

This takes me back to the days of quarto and foolscap paper, red & black typewriter ribbons, carbon paper, the messy correcting fluid to use on the waxy stencils for the Gestetner or Roneo duplicators, and – in the days before Snopake or Tippex – the hard erasers to make corrections to typing on paper [remembering to put some scraps of paper between the carbon paper and any flimsy paper copies being made to prevent a dreadful smudge on the copies]. Where I worked the typists and secretaries were unbelievably competent, producing page after page of text with nary a fault to be found and setting out tabular work and legal documents on brief-sized machines with a wide platten [bigger than A3!]. I wonder if there are any typewriter repair men left nowadays – they were an essential service in every district as the keys jammed, the shift stopped shifting, or the carriage flew off to the right and landed in the waste paper basket. There was even a radio programme that had a signature ‘tune’ featuring the sound of a typewriter being given a good workout with each phrase ending with the “ding” of the bell marking the approach of the end of a line [five characters left].