Friday, July 28, 2017

Typewriters to Laptops




Do you remember plunking away on a Remington, Royal or Smith-Corona? Did you take a typing class to learn the QWERTY keyboard?  Or did and do you still muddle along with fingers in hunt and peck?




Jammed keys and carbon paper once ruled the day.  Writing progressed from draft to draft by rolling pages out of the platen. After a sigh, one inserted another white page and soldiered on: musing, typing, correcting, and typing again. It required hours of focused thought.  

Back then, cutting and pasting meant cutting pages into paragraphs and taping the choices in new order. This also involved pencil or pen corrections in the margins. A bottle of white fluid corrected small errors.

Then the electric typewriter arrived which had tape that corrected by removing lines of type. 

With the word processor, paragraphs could be re-arranged by a new form of cut and paste. Lines moved around right on the screen.

Now with laptop computers, one can go anywhere to patter away at the keyboard.  Freedom to write!

During the progress from the manual typewriter to the laptop what have you discovered along the way?  If you have only experienced writing on a computer, begin with your first experience using technology to write.

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