Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for September 21, 2023

At least it’s electric. I learned on a manual. “A S D F …”

Tell him it’s more efficient. It goes directly from the keyboard to the printer.

Carbon copies.

ahh mimeograph just hearing that and i can smell it

My parents bought me a typewriter after I learned to type, in eighth grade. That was 62 years ago, and I still have that typewriter, and it still works.

After that I’ll explain the card puncher to use for the computer.

The “screen” was in my head. I was like part of it – a human-computer-printer combination.

I learned on a manual and took a typewriter to college. But my kids are grown and married already, and even I left college with a desktop computer, so I wonder how old this guy was when he started having kids. (By the way, I still have my mom’s old manual typewriter that she took to college in the 50s).

a heard they outlawed mimeograph because the elementary kids where getting high sniffing it. They said it was a gateway drug to sniffing glue in art class

I think all my white out has dried up.

I took typing in high school in 1958. it’s about the only thing I learned in school that I still use.

“Shut up, you crummy kid,” I explained.

Bought mine in high school, when I had to start doing “papers.”

I remember mimeos, too.

We saved our college Smith-Coronas for the grandkids to play with.

We had a typewriter that was so old, I think they typed the Bible on it.

In the late 1990s I saw a manual typewriter, circa 1900 in an antique mall. A 3×5 card attached to it read “Y2K compliant.”

Tell him about the telegraph machine! Paging Sam Morse!

My dad worked for a company called “Modern Business Machines” and repaired mimeographs and adding machines (and comptometers!)

A bit earlier there were the typewriters that let you change fonts. The IBM Selectric, inspired perhaps by the invention of the golf ball, was the most famous. But one of my grandfathers had one back in the 19-teens that had cylinders of type that you could change, sort of like a later ASR-33 teletype, that he and my grandmother could use for typing mathematics papers including different alphabets.

let me tell you about the tv that took up most of the living room and didn’t even broadcast in color…

Sadly, I’m old enough to know what a mimeograph machine is. Learned how to use one in high school when I was taking a business machines class, which was right after my stenoghraphy class. (I swear I graduated in the 20th Century, 1975 to be exact. LOL!!)

Passing on knowledge: When at Basic and AIT in the military they always ask for volunteers for stuff and usually the thing you believed you had volunteered for wasn’t even close to what they called it – with one exception. If they asked, “Can anyone type?!” at formation it turns out it wasn’t a trick; that volunteer would be sent to the Company HQ or Battalion HQ and pretty much stayed there typing and drinking coffee etc. Yes, I learned this too late. Anyone thinking of or young enough to joinup, keep this in mind!

My typewriter has the distinction of having been a calendar pin-up. It’s a portable purchased by my Dad in the mid-60s, and I used it to type high school and college papers in the 70s. In 2014, I found one a calendar that featured typewriters (the selection was based on various design aspects and overall popularity). Well, my Dad’s typewriter was this calendar’s Miss December, so of course I had to buy it — not to mention that I like typewriters.

I still have it, though I haven’t used it in something over three decades. For any typewriter aficionados out there, it’s a Hermes 3000.

We have a very old portable typewriter on a shelf in our living room. Young children are intrigued with it.