A bit of conversation in a thread over in MPSIMS has me wondering. Does anyone know which was the last year you could go to the store and buy a manual typewriter, before they were obsoleted by computers?
I’m pretty sure I saw portable manuals in zippered cases into the early '80s at places like Sears, at the poor-relations end of the display of electrics.
Also, was there a manual typewriter that had a 1 key? On all the models I’ve seen, you had to use the lower-case L. I don’t recall seeing a 1 key until electrics, like the IBM Selectric and Smith-Corona jobs (that hummed and vibrated when powered up).
Manual typewriters are still being used. They are convenient for typing small notes and make labels of all sorts. No power required. The one key on my old SC had a removeable/interchangeable type for special characters.
And no, in my vague memories, I don’t recall ever using one that didn’t have a ‘1’ key. Where would you put the exclamation mark?! (I’ll check tomorrow on the WW2 example, in the non-typewriter museum I work at)
My Mom’s manual typewriter from the 50’s didn’t have a “1” key and we would use the lower case L. To make a “!”, you would use single quote and then back space and use a period.
When I worked at the pawn shop, we got quite a few requests for manual typewriters from sailors on foreign freight vessels. Even though they were “outdated”, we would take in one or two just for this reason.
Or push the spacebar down and hold it (carriage moves half a notch), type a l, type a ., then release spacebar (carriage, which has been frozen while you typed the l and the ., moves the other half a notch).
Yes, there were some typewriter keyboards with the numeral 1.
When I worked in television we had special typewriters for writing scripts. All the letter keys were upper-case, and there was a key with “1.” As I recall the letters were bigger than the standard “elite” or “pica” sizes found on a normal home or office typewriter.
Why did we write scripts in upper case? My WAG is that it made them easier to read without confusing p, g or q; b or d; m and n, etc.
That’s odd, because it’s pretty well-known (or at least widely-asserted) that lowercase is easier to read if mixed-case isn’t possible. Lowercase allows the mind to pick out word forms more easily, the argument runs, whereas all-caps turns focus to individual letters.
It’s pretty well-known in the programming world, anyway: The only programming languages that default to all-caps source files are relics of the punch card era when all-caps was all you had in the limited pre-ASCII character sets common at the time. (And that goes back to pre-computer teletypes, which were all-caps for some ungodly reason.) Nearly all languages designed after that period define lower-case reserved words if they’re case-sensitive at all. (And if they aren’t case-sensitive, lower-case is preferred in all modern source code.)
For years IBM Selectrics had a font-ball called “Orator” that was about 10%-oversized all caps. It was intended for typing speeches, so the reader could see it at a glance from a distance on a podium. Given the limitation that the typewriters had fixed horizontal pitch, making the letters as big as possible was the best they could do.
I agree with your point that readability would be better in mixed or lower-case, but the goal at the time was to make the largest possible etter that fit into a 10-to-the-horizontal inch space, and lowercase letters, once you accound for descenders, would have been much smaller.
I am familiar with it, and I don’t buy it. It sounds like one of the many stories told about Dumb People In Management, and it’s cute enough to set off my BS detector.
