I once had a typewriter. Don't remember getting it or where it came from. Probably from a relative. A small but heavy black one, with it's own worn case. I loved the clatter of the keys when I'd type something - sometimes I'd fat finger it and two keys flying up at the same time would stick together just before they were to strike the page. Not nearly as cool as the rotating ball, but still cool.
I got pretty good at using that correction paper, just back up the carriage, put the paper over the misspell, restrike it with the same letter and the white stuff would come off, cover the mistake, back it up again and type right over it. Kinda messy, but better than starting all over or xxxx-ing it out and leaving it like that. I used it once in awhile in high school (after I took typing class), and college, and afterward. Not for school work of course, hell no, nothing was ever required to be typed. Some of the letters were fainter than others, and a little out of alignment, so not for resumes either. I don't remember what I ever used it for but I know I did. I lugged it from place to place whenever I moved, kept it right there in the hall closet if the place had one.
Sometimes years went by and I never even looked at it.
Then one day I wanted to use it for something. Lucky thing too that I had one. I'm looking forward to getting it out, using it again. I'll just get it out of the hall closet, where the board games and maybe an old umbrella are kept, plus the wrapping paper and maybe a Christmas tree stand.
Where's my typewriter? I know I left it in here. It's not anywhere else in the house. It's just gone? No one knows a thing about it? Really? What, was it taking up too much space? Thank goodness we have all this room for shoes. Dammit.
My stint as an intelligence analyst at Plattsburgh AFB involved intimate relationships with manual typewriters. I got stationed there in May of 1975 before word processors or desktop computers became common place.
Lowest ranking airmen in my office were assigned a task involving receipt and tracking of classified message traffic from the major 3 letter agencies. This involved picking up the classified message printouts from the Comm center a few blocks away and then typing up a form which described each piece of classified information with certain identification information such as control number, subject, description, classification, originator, date received, etc. The form was about 1/3 the size of a regular sheet of paper. AF Form 310 just jumped into my head.
The form had to be typed in triplicate. Which meant carbon paper needed to be cut and placed in between the forms. The number one rule about filling out the forms was that there could be no typos and no corrections. If you made a mistake you had to tear it out and start over.
I had done a fair bit of typing as a kid but never actually learned touch typing. My mother was a legal secretary so we always had a typewriter at home, actually a manual and an electric. And eventually even a selectric. But it had been years since I tried typing anything. They probably should have included that in our tech school.
You would have to mash the keys pretty hard to get a decent impression on the third form in the stack. It wasn’t graceful and it certainly wasn’t speed typing. Because the forms had fields that had to be filled in, the carbon paper wouldn’t last very long. Most of the carbon paper would be fine, but if you type the date in the same place on 3 or 4 forms, it’s not going to transfer to the paper.
Shortly after I got there the DIA and CIA changed their procedures for disseminating classified information. They had been sending out daily or twice daily compositions of all the messages for a single day. I would compare this to how Media Matters transmits the daily talking points to all the news organizations. Something happened and it was decided that a really important message shouldn’t have to wait for the daily compilation so they began sending out individual messages. I compare this to the AP News Wire. Very sound process improvement. Except it meant that instead of getting 3-4 multi page classified messages per day we were suddenly getting 100-150. A task that used to take 20-30 minutes began taking most of the day.
The other challenge that was unique to the intelligence division at Plattsburgh AFB is that it was a cinder block building with no windows and no insulation in the walls. We had a central steam heating plant on the base, but there were weeks at a time when the temperature in my office area never got above 60. Most people that got tasked with typing up these forms did so with gloves on for parts of the winter.
I remember there was joy in Mudsville the day we got our IBM Selectric in the office with an Orator ball. A major function of my job was to read the intelligence message traffic, and decide which items were the most important to brief to the command staff and the aircrews on alert duty. We would prepare bullet charts for each “news†story. When I got there the only way we had to create these briefings was to use a product called PressType. Dry transfer lettering. You had to position the presstype just so, and then rub each letter with a burnishing tool. This took hours to do for a complete briefing. But the font on the manual typewriters was too small for briefing charts. The Orator ball never really did a good job of making briefing charts. The font was never quite big enough and the quality of the image was seldom crisp.
visitors can't see pics , please
register or
loginWe had a huge stock of presstype in every imaginable font. It was great for making your own labels for cassette tapes.