Just a deep dive in the history of the enter/return all the way back to the earliest typewriters.
Just a deep dive in the history of the enter/return all the way back to the earliest typewriters.
Typewriters, born in the 1870s, did not understand information, and didn’t care about the meaning of their output.
Early models lacked 0 and 1 keys for cost cutting reasons. You were supposed to type a capital O or a lowercase l instead – they looked just about good enough. Teachers and tutorials encouraged you to overprint to create missing characters: type I on top of S to get a dollar sign, for example, or even reach for a pencil to fill in a missing part if overtyping wasn’t good enough.
Did anyone else do their earliest writing on a typewriter? I was a very young author in the 70s. My grandparents had a couple typewriters, including an antique from the 19th century, so I was able...
Did anyone else do their earliest writing on a typewriter? I was a very young author in the 70s. My grandparents had a couple typewriters, including an antique from the 19th century, so I was able to learn to type on it with the manual return lever (very satisfying).
I wrote my first fiction on an electric typewriter, which felt futuristic at the time but is VERY HARD. The trope of a suffering writer pulling out the sheet of paper and crumpling it up to add it to an overflowing bin is true. It was more like carving stone tablets than word processing software. As not only a preteen writer but also typist I was terrified of mistakes. Fixing them was a laborious task with correction tape, where you would reposition the white tape over the black ink and strike.
I have never had a linear brain, and the constraints of handwriting and typewriting nearly sunk me as a writer. Each 8.5x11 page has its own energetic introduction and cliffhanger. Each 8.x11 page must be formatted just so. And may all the writing gods help you if you make a significant third draft revision--you'll be manually re-typing the entire project again.
Then I got access to my friend's Macintosh in 1981. Writing changed. Instead of being a very narrow tightrope I must walk across it was instead a garden, a recursive place filled with epicycles and mini-seasons and ecologies. I could go back to previous pages and cut and paste and rearrange everything. My creativity blossomed.
I am in awe of the great writers of yore who created masterworks with typewriters and quills. Especially the epics. Either their minds were truly superhuman or they developed some killer outlines. Probably a little of both. I wonder what the future holds for the kids. AI-collaborations done over VR?
...i learned to type on my parents' manual singer in the seventies, so our IBM selectrics in intermediate school were quite the sea change for me, one from which i've never quite recovered; over...
...i learned to type on my parents' manual singer in the seventies, so our IBM selectrics in intermediate school were quite the sea change for me, one from which i've never quite recovered; over the past four decades since transitioning to computers, my peers have always commented on my recognisably-percussive typing technique...
My grandmother was so proud of her typing skills. 80 WPM. That alone made her one of the most valuable secretaries in the office. She met my grandfather at Fort Mason in San Francisco in 1940....
My grandmother was so proud of her typing skills. 80 WPM. That alone made her one of the most valuable secretaries in the office. She met my grandfather at Fort Mason in San Francisco in 1940. They both worked for the US Army.
Her arthritis got so bad in the last couple decades of her life and she was so depressed that she couldn’t show us her mastery.
My mom had a pretty nice electric typewriter when I was young. If I'm not totally hallucinating, I believe it had some sort of fancy automatic correction tape mechanism. I never really used it...
My mom had a pretty nice electric typewriter when I was young. If I'm not totally hallucinating, I believe it had some sort of fancy automatic correction tape mechanism. I never really used it much, as we had our first PC with dot matrix printer by the time I started writing a lot for school.
I was born in the mid 80s, and I don't think I've ever actually seen a typewriter with my own two eyes. My parents both worked at a cutting-edge Kinko's (print shop) and used a Mac Plus for all...
I was born in the mid 80s, and I don't think I've ever actually seen a typewriter with my own two eyes.
My parents both worked at a cutting-edge Kinko's (print shop) and used a Mac Plus for all their typing needs, and my school had Apple II's and dot matrix printers.
That encouraged good habits though. Prototyping, writing, and revising where very different stages separated in time. Nowadays, unless you have great discipline, you end up brainstorming,...
And may all the writing gods help you if you make a significant third draft revision--you'll be manually re-typing the entire project again.
That encouraged good habits though. Prototyping, writing, and revising where very different stages separated in time. Nowadays, unless you have great discipline, you end up brainstorming, outlining, writing, proofreading, and revising all at the same time in an endless, neurotic loop. That is a bad way to work.
This is a fantastic commentary. I grew up with a computer in the house as my father was able to afford an IBM in the early 80s. But he kept making kids with my mom and the money got tight... thing...
This is a fantastic commentary. I grew up with a computer in the house as my father was able to afford an IBM in the early 80s. But he kept making kids with my mom and the money got tight... thing is, I learned how to play poker and various other games with a computer that I was not allowed to spend much time with, but I had to learn DOS to load the games, but once upon a time I hung out with my friend across the street and she had Black Caldron on her Apple and... well, thing is...
I so very remember CR and then later "enter", but also my mom had a typewriter and I was homeschooled and had to use that early in my "growing up" education.
Thing is, I've recently realized the aspects of regexp, which makes me view all this in that light.
Sorry, that was a bit of Dickens: short story long.
Just a deep dive in the history of the enter/return all the way back to the earliest typewriters.
Did anyone else do their earliest writing on a typewriter? I was a very young author in the 70s. My grandparents had a couple typewriters, including an antique from the 19th century, so I was able to learn to type on it with the manual return lever (very satisfying).
I wrote my first fiction on an electric typewriter, which felt futuristic at the time but is VERY HARD. The trope of a suffering writer pulling out the sheet of paper and crumpling it up to add it to an overflowing bin is true. It was more like carving stone tablets than word processing software. As not only a preteen writer but also typist I was terrified of mistakes. Fixing them was a laborious task with correction tape, where you would reposition the white tape over the black ink and strike.
I have never had a linear brain, and the constraints of handwriting and typewriting nearly sunk me as a writer. Each 8.5x11 page has its own energetic introduction and cliffhanger. Each 8.x11 page must be formatted just so. And may all the writing gods help you if you make a significant third draft revision--you'll be manually re-typing the entire project again.
Then I got access to my friend's Macintosh in 1981. Writing changed. Instead of being a very narrow tightrope I must walk across it was instead a garden, a recursive place filled with epicycles and mini-seasons and ecologies. I could go back to previous pages and cut and paste and rearrange everything. My creativity blossomed.
I am in awe of the great writers of yore who created masterworks with typewriters and quills. Especially the epics. Either their minds were truly superhuman or they developed some killer outlines. Probably a little of both. I wonder what the future holds for the kids. AI-collaborations done over VR?
...i learned to type on my parents' manual singer in the seventies, so our IBM selectrics in intermediate school were quite the sea change for me, one from which i've never quite recovered; over the past four decades since transitioning to computers, my peers have always commented on my recognisably-percussive typing technique...
My grandmother was so proud of her typing skills. 80 WPM. That alone made her one of the most valuable secretaries in the office. She met my grandfather at Fort Mason in San Francisco in 1940. They both worked for the US Army.
Her arthritis got so bad in the last couple decades of her life and she was so depressed that she couldn’t show us her mastery.
Yeah I used typewriters. Manuals were awful but I loved the electric like the IBM Selectric. I wish I had one.
My mom had a pretty nice electric typewriter when I was young. If I'm not totally hallucinating, I believe it had some sort of fancy automatic correction tape mechanism. I never really used it much, as we had our first PC with dot matrix printer by the time I started writing a lot for school.
I was born in the mid 80s, and I don't think I've ever actually seen a typewriter with my own two eyes.
My parents both worked at a cutting-edge Kinko's (print shop) and used a Mac Plus for all their typing needs, and my school had Apple II's and dot matrix printers.
That encouraged good habits though. Prototyping, writing, and revising where very different stages separated in time. Nowadays, unless you have great discipline, you end up brainstorming, outlining, writing, proofreading, and revising all at the same time in an endless, neurotic loop. That is a bad way to work.
...this is an extraordinarily well-researched, structured, and documented essay: nice find!..
The author literally wrote the book on the topic.
What a great and terrible thing to discover so long after the initial print run, with no new prints planned.
I would love to own this. :(
Yeah me too, but there doesn't even seem to be an eBook version?
It's a very artistic book with lots of images, not very well suited for an e-reader. I suspect that's the reason for there not being an eBook.
I get that, but if it existed I'd still take a nice PDF version and read it wherever I could. Oh well.
This is a fantastic commentary. I grew up with a computer in the house as my father was able to afford an IBM in the early 80s. But he kept making kids with my mom and the money got tight... thing is, I learned how to play poker and various other games with a computer that I was not allowed to spend much time with, but I had to learn DOS to load the games, but once upon a time I hung out with my friend across the street and she had Black Caldron on her Apple and... well, thing is...
I so very remember CR and then later "enter", but also my mom had a typewriter and I was homeschooled and had to use that early in my "growing up" education.
Thing is, I've recently realized the aspects of regexp, which makes me view all this in that light.
Sorry, that was a bit of Dickens: short story long.