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'The Good 'Ol Days'

Manual Typewriters....

...

I remember doing term papers in High school with those...

'Till we got a word proccessor.... :running:
 
I remember those old things, I think they even did a "Twilight Zone" episode on them starring Bergis Meridith playing the devil. Anywho they had a few in the town and they were facinating, but imagine what the EPA could do with all that melting lead.

Yeah, we had word processors too, about ten years or so after I did any Term Papers, lol.

Beard
 
I bought an old IBM 'Selectric' that has the funny little ball that goes all over the place when you type on the page. I got it at an employee auction about 16 years ago. It still works... just like a jewel. I have had it stashed in my garage for a while now.

BB686:USA-flag:
 
I took two years of typing way back in high school. At the time, computers smaller than a room were just a gleam in someone's eye.

Linotype? I love to get my hands on the alloy ingots. That stuff makes the best cast bullets for modern guns. Haven't found any in quite a while and my stash has gotten pretty small.
 
Willy said:
I took two years of typing way back in high school. At the time, computers smaller than a room were just a gleam in someone's eye.

Linotype? I love to get my hands on the alloy ingots. That stuff makes the best cast bullets for modern guns. Haven't found any in quite a while and my stash has gotten pretty small.
Click to expand...

Willy, for that you may have to go to some 3rd world country. I had three ingots left, but I gave them last year to my son, who has been busy casting 38s from them and shooting them faster than he can cast them. BTW, wheel balancing weights have also the right amount of tin and antimony in them. She if you can swing a deal with a tire sales place. They never reuse the old balancing weights.
 
It makes me wonder what the equivalent of being a com guy would've been back in the day, Panther. I guess you coulda been a more conventional admin troop or worked on radios.
 
tigisfat said:
It makes me wonder what the equivalent of being a com guy would've been back in the day, Panther. I guess you coulda been a more conventional admin troop or worked on radios.
Click to expand...

People don't realize how big "comm" is.....The old "3C" AFSC was largest or 2nd largest (I forget) enlisted AFSC in USAF....The amount of jobs available were and still are quite large in number...

Nowadays, 'comm' doesn't exist anymore since it's been operationalized...
 
Man those pictures bring back memories, I started selling typewriters just as the "Electronic" typewriter was making an impact on the office world. I sold Olivetti one of the giants in the buiness at the time, they were #2 to IBM and in our market we actually sold more electronics then IBM did. IBM were kind of slow getting into the electronic market and kept selling that Selectric (the Golf Ball Electric) for a few years after the market shifted away from mechanical machines. I got my start with computers in that job, the Olivetti typewriters were expandable into full blown Word PRocessors, you could buy an external CPU and screen to attach to the typewriter. They were pretty cool, the typewriter was the keyboard and printer (a Daisy Wheel printer) and the CPU and screen were attached. The system ran the CPM operating system on a Motorola Z50 CPU at a break next speed of 2.4 mhz, talk about top of the line... oh yeah RAM 32K, and a 5.25" SS/DD floppy disk, that was an unbelivable capacity of 320K... Can you say WOW, I knew you could...

I have to say it was fun, and I learned allot selling those things, when Olivetti added Versa-Calc to the software (their vresion of VisiCalc the first Spread Sheet software) we thought technology had reached it's peak.
 
One other thing that came to mind looking at those old type bar machines, the key layout, here is a trivia question for all to ponder. Does anyone know why the typewriter keys (and now the standard computer keyboards) are laid out in the QWERTY layout?
 
My understanding is that they were laid out to best use the keys most often used in the English language. I know when I was in Belgium, the typewriter keyboards had a different layout. Drove me nuts.

Kofs about the wheel weights, I've got a bunch of those but the linotype makes for a harder bullet than the wheel weights do. I've got an alloy that I mixed up myself that's almost as hard as linotype but not quite.

Just checked... France and Belgium use AZERTY
 
Yep, I took a year of typing in high school, and with today's keyboard technology, darn glad I did, though I had no idea at the time why I took it. (Other than I needed a course to fill a spot on my cirriculum)

The class was split into half manual and half electric. I started the course on a manual, ended the course on an electric.

To this day I am QWERTY aware! And loving it.
 
Typwriters and Printing

My most valuable classes in school and college were typing. My kids call it "keybording" now. Either way, it's been a skill most valuable to me.

We still have my wife's grandparents old manual typwriter (in its original case) and it has outlived two other manual typwriters that I wore out over the years. Of the electric typwriters that I've used, the IBM Selectric (with the funny ball) was the best of the breed, but in no way competetive with today's computers.

I remember when the local paper switched from type set to Off Set printing of the newspaper. I went down and bought as many 25 pound linotype ignots as I could afford. I don't know how many 38 and 45 pistol and 45/70 cast lead bullets I made with those ignots, but I sure wish I still had a few of them now. I mixed the lino type with range scavenged lead or wheel weights to make virtually perfect bullets.
 
.....As some of you have mentioned,....I didn't realize it at the time but taking that one typing course in high school had a profound, positive effect all these years later. From typing up college papers on my Olivetti portable,....to typing this right now. I still have the Olivetti parked in a closet,...don't have the heart to pitch it. It got me through.
 
OK history lesson for everyone on Keyboard layout, the early typewriters produced in the US and UK used a standard Alphabetical layout a-z however these were type bar machines and these bars would frequently jam, especially when the typists became more proficient (mostly men in that day) so to save replacing type bars so often Thomas Edison developed the QWERTY layout to SLOW DOWN the speed at which the most common keys are used. So there you have it the QWERTY layout is designed to make us type slower, if you check any of the Online encyclopaedias look up the Dorvak Keyboard, a newer layout that is designed to allow typists to type at speeds close to normal speech. Just for the record a good typist is considered to have 65 Words per minute, an very good typist is 80 WPM +, my wife is one of the best I have ever seen she can do close to 120, I once watched a demonstration of one of our sales reps back in the 80's he got 2 hours instruction and practice with a Dorvak and he was able to easily type at 200 WPM and that was considered below average by the instructor.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice" /><o:p></o:p>
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Too bad the QWERTY layout has such a strong hold on the market hey!<o:p></o:p>
 
Oddly enough, my very first "printer" for my ancient Commodore SX-64 "Executive"* was a Brother XL-1** electric, which I bought specifically because it had a printer port!

I could use the typewriter manually, or use the Commodore as a word processor, and then print out "typed" papers for my classes... ;)

BTW, for a really comprehensive overview of typewriter history, check out the "Typewriter Museum" http://www.mrmartinweb.com/type.htm

The oldest typewriter in his collection is this one, the Blickensderfer #5 built in 1886!
View attachment 1247
* http://oldcomputers.net/sx64.html

** View attachment 1248
 
Remington-Rand Typwriters and Pistols

An off shoot of the typwriter industry was in WW II. The Remington-Rand typwriter company contracted to produce some very good Government Model 1911 A1 45 semi-automatic pistols for the US Military. Used 'em quite a bit until they were replaced by the Beretta M9.

I wore out a Remington manual typwriter in the 70s, but my personal Remington-Rand 1911 is still going strong and it is 65 plus years old.
 
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