(Reposted from my blog.)

In one of my blog posts, I talked about my old mechanical typewriter. So it was with a little nostalgic sadness that I read the story today that the last manufacturer of typewriters has ceased production.
Yes, typewriters are officially a thing of the past, consigned to the history books along with 78 rpm records (or even just records), quill pens and penny-farthing bicycles. No more will anyone have to dirty their fingers changing a ribbon, go back and paint over a mistake with correcting fluid, unjam the mechanical arms that have locked because two keys were accidentally hit at the same time. No more will anyone hear the click-clack of the keys, the ker-ching of the end-of-line bell, the whirring ratchet as the carrier is pushed back for the next line.

Apparently there are a few hundred typewriters still available in stock and then that's it. No more new ones to be had. It is a little sad, though I have to admit that I haven't used a typewriter for thirty years or more.

One slightly puzzling aspect of the story is that it says they ceased production in 2009. It seems rather a long interval between the event and the news of the event. Nevertheless another small portion of the present has now become the past.

It is a little sad. I had a mechanical typewriter when I was a child and I remember spending many happy hours with it, though I can't imagine wanting to go back to one now.

One feature of the mechanical typewriter that persists to this day is the QWERTY keyboard. This was designed by Christopher Sholes in the 1870s as a way of ensuring the mechanism didn't jam (see here), and is completely irrelevant to the operation of an electronic keyboard. Yet, despite the invention of numerous other keyboard layouts such as Dvorak, which is arguably easier to learn and use, QWERTY has remained almost universal to this day. What other aspects of the modern computer go back nearly 140 years?

I picked up an old Royal portable a decade or two back. Just last year, I decided to get it cleaned and buy new ribbon for it. But where to go? A quick googling revealed that there were two typewriter repair shops close-by. In the same city! Ah, Berkeley. I went to one and got the thing fixed. When asked what I was going to do with it, I told the owner of the shop that I was going to write blog entries on it, scan them (corrections and all), and post the image online.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
I told the owner of the shop that I was going to write blog entries on it, scan them (corrections and all), and post the image online.

You should do it! I think it's a brilliant idea. If I still had a typewriter I'd make it a new feature of my own blog.

You mean my three gross bottles of Wite-Out are wasted?