Not that it was sloppy or rogue; it was uniform. I just recognized his touch the same way I would his hand on my hip.
Early '80’s cable tuner. Maybe 20 buttons in a row on the box, and a knob you would turn to move to the next tier and start over again
. Worked really well, if you knew what channel you wanted. Touch one button, flip tje
Argh. Flip the knob, any channel in two movements. Went to radio shack and set up with the box back by our couch.
Now, just to watch OTA takes maybe 10 different commands.
Word 6 really was an impressive piece of software. I miss it too.
A teenaged friend’s observation on watching me use a real typewriter: That is so cool. You can actually see what you’re printing as you’re doing it (and a four year asked me in a voice filled with awe “Is that a typewriter?”).
I still do basic math on paper.
Somehow, angrily hitting the “off” switch just isn’t the same, is it? I wouldn’t give up my cellphone, but damn, I miss that.
[quote=“epbrown01, post:57, topic:673851”]
In my 20s and between jobs, I decided to write a novel. Being a young romantic, I had to use a real typewriter like my heroes, so I went to a thrift shop that was swimming in them, bought a very nice portablefor $20 and off I went. Here’s what your rose-colored glasses don’t tell you - typewriters are LOUD. The keys clacking, that bell dinging at the end of every line, that zipping sound when I hit the carriage return - drove my neighbors nuts, and hampered my writing as well since when inspriation struck at 2 a.m. I didn’t want to start up with that racket. I bought a laptop about 100 pages in.
Whose rose-colored glasses? Are you under the misapprehension that I’ve never used a typewriter?
I’ll be 44 next month, which possibly puts me in the last generation of (former) professional writers who used typewriters rather than computers to compose on. The first story I ever sold, in 1988, was on a typewriter. I’m quite aware of the aural impact of the device, and likewise the olfactory (by which I mean the smell of the ribbon). I like both those things.
I transitioned to a computer around '92 and to a laptop in 2000. I’ll happily concede that laptops are more efficient in many ways–it let me write in more places, when I was still a writer. However, the ease of editing also leads to over-editing, I think. And
[quote=“Skald_the_Rhymer, post:87, topic:673851”]
I’m slightly more modern, I have fond memories of the screech and rattle of my form-feed dot matrix printer laboriously spitting out my term papers, pausing only for the chunka-chunka-griiiiiiinnnnnnddd-chunka-chunka of the floppy drive loading the next buffer.
I could set a form feed box, leave for the day, and confidently come back to 300 perfectly printed pages. Nowadays, just try and get 50 pages out of a printer without it jamming or grabbing extra sheets.
I miss my VHS tapes. I could put three, four, sometimes five MST episodes or movies per long-playing tape. I’d put a tape in the VCR and have preprogrammed viewing going at a moments notice. And I could edit out commercials from tv shows or trailers from movies. I’m sure that some of this could be remedied with a DVR, but right now I only have DVDs and I HATE not being able to go directly to the movie without fighting my way through menus, trailers, and piracy warnings that you can’t click past.
I know my parents really miss their old fashioned remote. It was voice activated and would change channels on the TV or radio, could be programmed to put on the right show at the right time, would open the garage door, and even get the newspaper if it was raining. They were rather put out when the remote moved out to college and they had to spend money on different devices for all these tasks. Especially right after the first time they had to open the garage door themselves in the rain.
The “rose-tinted glasses” remark is used to indicate people that fondly remember things they haven’t done in a while, not things they’ve never done. I’m not under the impression you never used a typewriter, but your post gave the distinct impression you haven’t used one in a while and haven’t had to deal with the shortcomings in any appreciable way. An impression reinforced by your reply, I’ll note.
This made me smile.
NM
NM
Not always, apparently!
More seriously, I think that the typewriter era suffered from under-editing; exactly the inverse of what you suggest. People got lazy, and submitted stories that really, really needed one more level of fixing.
Robert Heinlein’s “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” is a hearty example: a charming story, but Heinlein wandered into it without knowing the end, and thus contradicted himself several times in the course of the tale. Today, he would fix that with minimal effort. In the typewriter era, it would mean a complete re-write, and that would mean a complete re-typing…maybe two.
Cut and paste is your friend…and block-delete is even better!
My parents’ remote also did the dishes and the laundry without any activation. They really, really missed that remote when it got married and went off to another country. They had other remotes, but those had to be voice activated.
I don’t know about CAD specifically, but programmers have a distinctive “feel” to their work, too. In my old job of (attempting to) maintain an ancient F77 code, I got quite familiar with at least three or four of the other folks who had worked on it before me, even though I only knew one or two of them by name (one of them was nice enough to put his name in the comments, and I know my advisor was one of the other ones, but I’m not certain which one).
One feature I do miss about VHS tapes is that you could stop watching a movie in the middle, take it out of the machine, watch a bunch of other movies, and when you put it back in again, you could resume watching from the exact same place in the movie, without having to fiddle around to find it, or have to figure whether you left off in Scene 14 or Scene 15. Inertia was your friend.
Analog TV. Sure, you sometimes got a worse picture if you were getting a less than ideal analog signal, but it beats not getting a picture at all like you do with a less than ideal digital signal.
This X 2. All of this.
I miss pop-top tabs. Yeah you had to throw them away but you got a little ring to play with and most of all you didn’t have to shove the metal tab down into your drink. I eventually got used to that but it took a really, really long time.