Yesterday it was announced that the last major manufacturer of typewriters is closing their doors. Several smaller makers of typewriters piped up with Monty Python-esque yelps of “We’re not dead yet!”, but the typing is definitely on the wall. The era of typewriters is essentially over.<\/p>\n

One of my earliest memories involves a typewriter. When I was a toddler my dad used to work the 3pm-11pm shift, and occasionally on Friday nights I would somehow stay awake long enough to catch a glimpse of him right before falling asleep. On one of those Fridays I remember sitting at my mom’s typewriter (which was sitting on our coffee table) and randomly typing letters, asking my mom after each few keystrokes, “Is this a word?”<\/p>\n

That may have been the last time I used a manual typewriter. Although my parents had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter in our house, we also had computers. My dad had a daisy wheel printer that used a typewriter head, meaning that I could write school papers on a computer and print them out with typewriter-quality. The only thing our Smith-Corona had over the computer printer was that we had a few different colored ribbons we could use.<\/p>\n

In high school, I witnessed the transition between typewriters and computers first hand. In mid-high, we had the option of taking “typewriting” (I skipped it; I had been typing on computer keyboards for almost a decade at that point). By the time I was a senior we were taking “business computing” classes, learning the basics of word processors, spreadsheets and databases. I can’t remember seeing a typewriter at any point in college, or anywhere else since then except maybe the DMV.<\/p>\n

When I was working in Spokane as a LAN Administrator for the FAA, we had access to a place called the DRMO. It stands for “Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office”, but I just knew it as “Dr. Moe’s”. Essentially it was a place where we, as a government agency, could get free equipment that other government offices and agencies had thrown away before it got auctioned off to the public. Several of the guys I worked with loved<\/i> going to Dr. Moe’s and bringing back piles of free junk — think of it as antique shopping for dudes. One day, a couple of the guys I worked with drug back an entire pallet full of typewriters, and thought I would be so proud of them. “These are typewriters<\/i>,” I said. “I’m a computer<\/i> guy. I’m trying to get you guys to stop using these!<\/i>” The next week, I made them take them all back to Dr. Moe’s.<\/p>\n

Like payphones, I’m sure my kids would recognize a picture of a typewriter, but I doubt they would be able to figure out how to use one. More than that, I doubt they would understand why anyone would ever need one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday it was announced that the last major manufacturer of typewriters is closing their doors. Several smaller makers of typewriters piped up with Monty Python-esque yelps of “We’re not dead yet!”, but the typing is definitely on the wall. The era of typewriters is essentially over. One of my earliest memories involves a typewriter. When I was a toddler my dad used to work the 3pm-11pm shift, and occasionally on Friday nights I would somehow stay awake long enough to catch a glimpse of him right before falling asleep. On one of those Fridays I remember sitting at my mom’s… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}