Msg: Re: DOS only machine?

Here is a contrasting point of view. I know there are some folks -- probably from the heyday of newsrooms -- who *still* swear by typewriters, and pretty much bypassed word-processing on computers entirely. Semi-Luddites, I guess. (But if you were headed into the jungle today, or somewhere remote that is without electricity, I suppose a manual typewriter would still win out for portability -- unless you were willing to write in longhand on notepads. Solar-powered netbooks, anyone ?)

I can tell you that one of my worst defeats, back in my journalism days, was a too large project that totally foundered for me in the mid-1970s. I had gone from the Olympia manual to an electric Coronamatic, at a time when I observed some deeper-pockets colleagues using a Kaypro system. (CP/M based, and then costing around 5 o4 6 grand.) I had a huge amount of source material, including "raw" interview transcripts, laboriously typed up from miles of tapes. This was several years before I finally got one of the XT clones, and discovered Xy II+. All the typing, retyping, whiting out, Xeroxing, cutting and pasting into re-Xeroxing what had just been assembled got old very quickly, and just overwhelmed me. Being able to re-order whole blocks of text with a few keystrokes was simply a pipe dream. There were some other things going wrong on that project, but the tedious, arduous nature of trying to put it all together was the main thing that sank the ship. The later switch to computer-based writing and editing was a gigantic paradigm shift very much for the better. I DO NOT look back on typewriters with any trace of nostalgia !

Jordan

From: Carl Distefano
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, January 2, 2018 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: DOS only machine?

Reply to note from Myron Gochnauer mailto:goch@xxxxxxxx Wed, 3 Jan 2018
01:00:29 +0000

Myron,

> Maybe I should just try to fix my 1959 Smith Corona typewriter,
> write with that, and scan it into my Mac Pro. :-)

A few years ago I finally let go of the Olympia portable that my
parents gave me in 1966, for my sixteenth birthday:

https://i.imgur.com/pTtblul.jpg

Their real stroke of genius was the add-on, so to speak: a book
called Teach Yourself Touch Typing. Little did they know how
essential that skill would become.

Honestly, though, I miss the look of typewritten text more than
the experience of producing it on a typewriter. (Struggling with
Wite-Out the night before a paper was due is not among my
fondest memories.) Happily, free TTF typewriter fonts are
plentiful on the Web. The output of my Olympia looked something
like this:

https://i.imgur.com/b5bgXiI.png

The font is Olympia Congress.

--
Carl Distefano
mailto:cld@xxxxxxxx

https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=icon

Virus-free. https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=link