Pluggers by Rick McKee for October 08, 2024

Who remembers “White Out” and carbon paper?

You’re a plugger if you have ever SEEN a typewriter.

When I took a Typing course on a manual typewriter in the summer before high school, I remember the room next door had large manual adding machines on each desk. They had multiple rows of keys, and a side crank. I thought, “How cool!”

There are plenty of old-fashioned typewriters around (although ink ribbons may be scarce), but how many old adding machines are still in use?

Still have the typewriter … Just don’t use it ;-)

And you’re handy if it still works.

I don’t think ANYBODY actually uses typewriters anymore, with the possible exceptions of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites. Or maybe steampunks or pretentious hipsters.

It easier than typing on teeny tiny onscreen keyboards me says.

Btw, what does “cc” stand for on an email? Carbon Copy

Thank Bette Nesmith Graham for inventing liquid paper, AKA white out.

Plugger still prefers the rotary phone.

We had a typewriter on a shelf inthe thrift store I do volunteer work at. A young boy, about the age of 6 – 7 looked at it and asked his mother what it was. She explained it was a typewriter that people used to use to type letters and such, but now we use a computer. The little boy said that’s a good thing becasue you can play games on a computer but not on a typewrite r – no mouse and no screen.

Our high school typing class had 26 manual typewriters and 2 electrics. One had to be able to type 60 words a minute with less than 4 errors in order to get to use one of the electrics. I never did. It wasn’t that I couldn’t type 60 wpm, but that I would automatically correct errors in the text as I went [the text almost always contained several spelling and grammar errors]. One of my early “lessons” that women and girls aren’t supposed to have a brain; we were supposed to be automatons. I only took one semester because I couldn’t stand typing all the “they is’s” and “we dun its.”

But learning to type “properly” and fast was beneficial. Much later in life, part of my job was to record all discussions and commentary during meetings for a project developing international standards and protocols. [Not secretarial notes, but verbatim notes.] The project involved a consortium of several hundred people from dozens of governments, agencies, universities, and corporations, and meetings and working groups were attended by representatives of each. Discussions were lively and, due to multiple languages, multiple areas of expertise, multiple agendas, we spent a lot of time hammering out priorities and terminology. Sometimes I would end up with over 100 pages from a half-day session. I edited these [correct spelling, full names of speakers, etc.], formated with proper headings and background information, and sent them to all members for review and comment. Silence meant consensus — if an agreement had been reached at a meeting and no concerns were raised by the members at large, it was accepted. If a concern was raised, it would be brought up for further discussion. If objections were raised later on, then my notes — raw and formatted — were evidence that the objection had been discussed and resolved. In the end, a new IEEE standard was born.

Still have my portable Royal manual. Best present I ever got.

I’m not quite that much of a plugger.

Even pluggers know it’s easier to edit and correct on a computer. That’s why I bought my first computer (a Kaypro II) in ‘82. I’v had 6 more since then, and I’m shopping for my 8th at 79. (If pluggers were still using their typewriters, how would they be reading GoComics?

I aint rich enough to buy refills for a dang type writer I just use googledocs like every other shlub these days.

My brother is a plugger. Sends me typewritten letters.

I owned three Underwoods. Tossed ‘em. Bought a Wi-Fi connected color laser printer. It wakes up and prints anything I send it from my iPad or iPhone. Life is better this way.

I’m old enough to remember how to write!

My birthday present in eighth grade was a manual typewriter that I had asked for. My mother – who was a secretary – helped me learn to type, with the promise that “it would cut my homework time in half” (which was all the motivation I needed, even though I don’t think it cut it quite that much). One of my graduation presents when I finished high school was an ELECTRIC typewriter – which I used all the way through college and for well over a decade afterwards, until finally getting my first home PC.

I learned to type on a clunky manual typewriter and was tested at 50 wpm. My wife had a Swiss Hermes typewriter – loved the smooth action on that one. I did rent-to-buy to get an IBM Selectric – even my Siamese couldn’t jam it and I could type 70 wpm.

On a recent trip to Humboldt County at an eclectic coffee shop in Ferndale, they had a manual typewriter and a blank sheet of paper set up on a window counter for customers to try.

I had forgotten how much finger strength it took. I could only type a few sentences with many mistakes. To think all our 20th century literature and documentation was produced on such machines.

Are there really any working old manual typewriters still in use??

In the early 1980s, before the PC explosion, there were devices solely for word processing.

The teachers started asking for typed reports in my junior year. My mom’s old Remington ‘Portable’ (in the sense it had it’s own carrying case) was put to good use.

I learned to type before I ever touched an PC … Sort of helped me down the road when I learned my way around Microsoft during night-shift work, using the office PC to self educate me in the use of Word, Excel and the general use of a computer.

One of my university professors was in shock when he asked me, “Was this done on…a typewriter?”