How far that first typewriter has come

Top row: typewriters - Bottom row: computers

When I was in high school, I was taught to type on that first typewriter, the Underwood, in the upper left. I remember that it took a LOT of strength to depress those keys properly, so that they would strike the paper. My pinky fingers weren't as strong as the others, so I had to work to get those letters to show up. You couldn't type very fast, or you'd find, as you checked your work, that you had misspelled the words. Then my first actual fancy typewriter, still manual, looked like that red portable Olympus.

Most of my working days before the advent of computers were spent typing on that final one in the top row: the Selectric. I supposed we used that one exclusively in our office because all you had to do to change the type was to replace the little ball, and it was electric (hence the name). I actually bought one of these for my home use, and as I remember I paid quite a lot of money for it, even though it was well used.

In the mid-1980s, we moved to computers, if you can call them that when you relate them to what we use today. That first picture in the second row is a Micom computer, which all the secretaries in my office shared. It used 8-inch floppy disks; you put in the disk and launched the program, and it would type out your manuscript. We were producing scientific papers, so you couldn't very well use a dot matrix printer. Everything was typed out, letter by letter. You could finally fix a typo on the screen and not have to start over! Wow, was that ever cool.

Then came my first actual personal computer, an Apple II, which had a 3.5-disk drive and seemed so very small! I had its use all to myself, and my productivity went way up. I loved this computer and was very sad when we moved to PCs with Windows 98. But I did get accustomed to it very quickly. The days of keys striking a paper through a ribbon were long gone.

That final picture is of a MacBook Air, on which I am typing this post. It's all right there in that little tiny flat thing in that last picture in the bottom row. When you open it up, you have the keyboard, and the internet gives me the ability to talk face to face with my sister, import pictures from my camera or iPhone, and basically be connected to the world.

My MacBook Air

How far we have come from those faraway days when I first learned to type on that old Underwood! And now many people type into tiny little phones, using their thumbs, one stroke at a time. But it's all MUCH faster that I was able to accomplish on that old manual typewriter. I found this funny, very short little video showing a woman who was out of the work force for awhile and returned. You would only understand this little 5-second video if you are a Boomer or older.


:-)