In 1999 I filled out some of my college application forms on a typewriter that my high school had. That was the last time I used one, I think.
It was a lot easier than trying to fill out the forms on the computer and printing them. You could of course fill them in by hand, but I have terrible handwriting.
Hey, I still use one about once a month or so. I work in a law firm, and sometimes something has to be added to a document or form after it has been signed by a remote person. So we fire up the old [some obscure brand] and I type it in.
Or an attorney wants to add some language to one of those damned pre-printed AIA forms.
And I’ll still do an occasional rolodex card on it for my old-school boss who keeps her ancient rolodex on her desk.
I don’t even know where our old portable is. Do we still have it?
I bought a Selectric with a symbol ball at least 35 years ago, having the idea of typing my own papers. The office was doing a terrible job. I first had to learn to type. My wife had an old (vintage 1945) teach yourself to type book. It worked. It even included an exercise in throwing the carriage return, although the Selectric had a button for that. But then, before I ever typed a paper for myself, I got my first computer in 1982. An origin IBM PC. In the meantime the program TeX for technical typing came along and I learned to use that, although I didn’t have a version for my PC. That’s okay, I wrote a mini-TeX program to drive my Epson computer to produce a decent printout. Essentially the only thing I ever did with that typewriter was learn to type.
I was at my chiropracter’s on Tuesday and his receptionist was typing, typing away the whole time. There is no computer in the office, they don’t take credit cards, nothing he couldn’t have had in the office 50 years ago. My family doctor has a computer on his desk, but as far as I can tell he used it only to print out prescriptions. His patient files are still the old handwritten ones. He has a fax machine, but no email. But it is clear he is winding down his practice.
I think there is still a typewriter in our office. For envelopes and, just possibly, for multi-part forms.
I volunteered to be on a committee of out town government. I was given a bunch of forms to fill out, in hard copy, handwritten not allowed. Had to scare up a typewriter from the Legal department at work.
The committee I was joining? The Technology Committee.
There was a typewriter repair shop in an alley near our office building until last year. Between the coin collectors shop and the smoke shop. Now there is Chinese tea and herb shop.
One of my customers still fills out his payment checks with a typewriter.
The tellers at my bank sometimes catch it and are amazed. Many of the tellers are so young that have never used a typewriter and a few have probably never even seen one.
I work in an office, use one every day a Canon AP5015.
My daughter who is eight had never seen a newspaper until we went to visit my parents recently. She was amazed that anyone would wait until the next day to read the news. She saw a typewriter in a fisheries museum in Nova Scotia on vacation this year. She’d only seen one in a movie before.
Eleven years ago I went to work at a major regional company. There were typewriters everywhere and carbon less copy forms galore. They had been bought out by an international giant. The executives of the acquired firm refused to use email, spreadsheets, etc. They expected their secretaries to print out their emails, put the papers in the in boxes on their desks. They would write the responses on the printouts and the secretaries would type them in the email replies. It could take a week to get a response back to the parent company.
The new owners kept 35 out of 300+ corporate employees. The rest had to be replaced. Some of them looked for corporate jobs for years that didn’t require computer skills. They all went out with resumes that highlighted the internally developed mainframe applications they had used, with little or no idea that those skills were completely useless to any other employer. They had what they called the “three genius” business model. The three guys at the top did all the thinking, everyone else just followed instructions. The first time someone referred to the three genius model, I thought they were joking or being sarcastic. They were perfectly serious, most of them anyway.
This was a multi billion dollar publicly traded company.
For me, the key advances that made the typewriter obsolete were (1) laser and inkjet printers replacing dot-matrix (which was OK for informal stuff, but you wouldn’t use it for a resume or cover letter), and (2) printers being able to print addresses on envelopes and mailing labels. IIRC, dot-matrix printers started to disappear in the mid-1990s, and printing envelopes and mailing labels became a fairly standard printer capability a few years later.
The old staccato rattle of typewriter keys is still a sonic shorthand for “breaking news”, though; I don’t know how many news programs use it in their introductions, but it’s a lot.
A few months back, my mother had an old typewriter she was trying to get rid of. She said she had tried donating it to Goodwill but they said they couldn’t take it because nobody buys them anymore.
One group of people that still use typewriters is prisoners (at least in New York). They’re not allowed to own computers so they still type things. So I suggested she donate it to a prison if they wanted it.
The law firm the Old Wench works at still keeps one for some odd forms that haven’t been computerized yet and I still use one for the odd letter or three I can’t hand write.
Yes – I still send letters.
2003?!
Circa 1998-2003?! How could this be possible? :eek:
Which company? Hints welcome.
Actually, now that I think about it, my mother has a Cyrillic one she probably still uses. Her computer, which is old for a computer, is capable of Cyrillic, but my mother probably isn’t capable of switching keyboards, and even though she can touch-type qwerty, I’m not sure if she can touch-type Cyrillic, and I know she doesn’t have an overlay, like the Hebrew one I have for my keyboard. She writes letters to friends in Russia, and probably mostly hand writes them, but she probably types sometimes. She occasionally gets asked to translate short articles, mostly when they need someone in the US to translate from Czech, Slovak or Old Church Slavonic into Russian, and she’d probably submit a typewritten copy. I’m sure whoever made the request loves getting that.
I had one of these. Iirc it was made by Smith-Corona, the typewriter company. It was essentially a very simplistic laptop with a screen holding maybe four or five lines of text, a built-in daisy wheel printer, and a floppy disk drive. The OS was minimal and pretty much the only app was the built-in word processor in ROM. You could transfer files via floppy to a real PC. I don’t recall what file format it used, but it may have been DOC or RTF. When you wanted to print a document, it would print it out for you onto paper via the built-in printer.
It also had a classic typewriter mode that let you type directly from keyboard to printer, bypassing the editor.
It was a neat little device, but after 2000 or so it was clearly has-been technology.
There’s a whole community of blogs, message boards, and meet up groups dedicated to buying, using, selling, and repairing typewriters. As you might expect, it’s artsy-crafty, hipsterish, antiquarian, favoring flea markets and used bookstores.
http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-links.html
That’s why specialty typewriter shops can demand such high prices:
Dying but not quite dead in India:
Almost correct. I think that “staccato rattle of typewriter keys” motif that you still hear on news shows was originally the sound, more specifically, of Teletype machines in newsrooms. So yeah, a kinda-sorta typewriter.
My parents had a 2700 Olivetti back in the early nineties… and they used it frequently until the house got flooded in a hurricane and water damaged the machine. I remember those machines being very common right around and before Windows 95 came out.
I still saw a few in some government buildings up to almost late 90s.
Some also use typewriters for (real or imagined) security reasons—you can’t install a trojan or other spyware on a bunch of little hammers striking a colored fabric. Actually, in the wake of the recent NSA spying scandal, typewriter sales over here have enjoyed a marked increase.
I would have thought the opposite was true. That ribbon of colored fabric you mentioned is a copy of every character you struck. All you need to do to read some top secret report that was typed out is pull an old ribbon out of the garbage and unroll it.