I remember metered typewriters at the library. Now they meter the Internet–well, you don’t have to pay, but they can kick you off after 30 minutes.
But just recently (April?) I had to go to Office Depot and rent InDesign to convert an advanced InDesign document down to the old version I have. I needed that intermediary step (thanks loads Adobe). It took me four minutes. Oddly, about 2007 I had to BEG my office to upgrade from PageMaker to InDesign. Now they have some advanced version in their office and I still have the one from 2007…
Until about 15 or so years ago, Kinkos (it was still Kinkos then, before FedEx bought it out) had typewriters that had initially been pay to use, in half hour increments, but as their pay to use computers became more popular and more plentiful, the typewriters became free (and probably less and less used) and then eventually disappeared. I remember using one along with a color self-serve copier and a buy-by-the-sheet heavyweight paper to dummy up a car insurance card. (I was legally insured but the card went missing, and I had to have one to get my car inspected.)
Greyhound Bus stations often had pay TVs. They were also the only seats in the place. The cop who patrolled the station would make sure your tv was on if you were seated, and he’d make you get out of the seat if it wasn’t on.
My understanding was that they were common enough in Britain that the euphemism “spend a penny” meant to go use the toilet. And the impression I got from The Corpse Walker was that pay holes-in-the-floor were fairly common in China for a long time.
I remember typing a term paper on a metered electric typewriter in the college library. This would have been in 1976 or 1977. I only did this once, because the library closed at 10 and I typically pulled all-nighters to finish term papers. Normally I’d be typing them at 3 a.m. on my crummy manual portable typewriter.
Shortly after this, my parents took pity on me and gave me an electric typewriter for Christmas — a Sears electric typewriter.
I also wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
According to his postscript to the novel, he was still broke. He tells a story about trying to write the novel in his garage but his young daughters kept coming by and wanting to play and he kept choosing to play with them instead of writing. So, he had to flee the home and ended up at the UCLA library.
I think he said he wrote the first draft for $9.80 and it was half the length of the published novel.
I remember the pay toilets in the Denver Airport in the late 60s. TMy brother and I (we must have both been under 8 at the time) found them deeply offensive.
We didn’t use the (usually available) free stalls, preferring to crawl under the locked door, then jam it open with wadded toilet paper. No way was the Man keeping us down!
I have vague memories of spending a week or so in the hospital when I was 5 or 6 and watching my grandmother putting quarters in a TV in the hospital room so I could watch cartoons.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of metered typewriters, but then I never learned to type until the Internet came along. I do remember coin-operated TVs in motel rooms though.
Yeah I remember those, too. They had them through at least 1995 at the Greyhound station in LA (the antepenultimate time I’ve taken a Greyhound. I hope to never again.) Also remember a guy trying to sell me a bag of slugs (at least that’s what we called those metal discs that could be used to fool some coin-operated machines) for the TV.
Bradbury also had a dramatic story about how he had to move into the YMCA in order to write one of his early books. And he began telling people decades after the fact that Fahrenheit 451 was really about people watching too much TV, an amazingly prescient view for somebody to have had in 1953.
Bradbury was a good author. But I suspect sometimes he applied his inventive skills to his own life and did a few revisions.
I did that once, I was 4 or 5, holiday shopping at Kaufmann’s department store in downtown Pittsburgh. My mom did eventually put a dime in the box, but it took her forever to find one and I was going to wet my pants if I waited. I think about crawling on a public restroom floor now and I cringe, and I realize that’s probably what the deterrent factor always was.
