Typewriters

[grampahol]

Some of you youngins may have never experienced using a typewriter, especially one of the old manual types as opposed to an electric, but there is definitely a difference.  The biggest difference between using a plain computer keyboard and a manual or even electric typewriter is with a typewriter when you're composing a letter say to grandma or even in business when you get stuck in your train of thought it's much more likely you'll get very distracted using a computer simply because with a click of the mouse you can be on a completely different page looking at porn, football videos, shopping or any number of distractions. With a typewriter as your only means of putting words on paper those same distractions simply don't exist. A typewriter kind of forces the brain to concentrate much more focused.
I grew up using my mother's old Olympia manual, a great old machine and ribbons were far more cheaper than printer cartridges.
Now, computers are far more efficient when it comes to editing, correcting mistakes, spelling and so on. You can quickly change fonts and much more, but in terms of concentration and staying on task the old fashioned typewriter can't be beat. There's another factor often overlooked, the tactile feel of the snappy feel a well tuned mechanical typewriter has..and the little bell reminding you to hit the return lever..
So anyway, typewriters are making a huge comeback in certain circles. There are now large typewriter events taking place in cities all around the world with everything from buying and selling, trading and such to speed contests and more.. My wife can type MUCH faster than I can and I'm pretty quick for a 3 fingered typist, 2 for the letters and a thumb for the space bar..  She can type upwards of 300 words per minute..   That's scary..

[George Cantstandya]

(11-07-2021, 02:04 PM)grampahol Wrote: My wife can type MUCH faster than I can and I'm pretty quick for a 3 fingered typist, 2 for the letters and a thumb for the space bar..  She can type upwards of 300 words per minute..   That's scary..

So she types at world record speeds?  That's impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typing

Quote:The fastest typing speed ever, 216 words per minute, was achieved by Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago in 1946 in one minute on an IBM electric using the QWERTY key layout.  As of 2005, writer Barbara Blackburn was the fastest English language typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak keyboard layout, she had maintained 150 wpm for 50 minutes, and 170 wpm for shorter periods, with a peak speed of 212 wpm. Blackburn, who failed her QWERTY typing class in high school, first encountered the Dvorak layout in 1938, quickly learned to achieve very high speeds, and occasionally toured giving speed-typing demonstrations during her secretarial career. She appeared on Late Night with David Letterman on January 24, 1985, but felt that Letterman made a spectacle of her.


The recent emergence of several competitive typing websites has allowed several fast typists on computer keyboards to emerge along with new records, though these are unverifiable for the most part. Two of the most notable online records that are considered genuine are 251.21 wpm on an English text on typingzone.com by Brazilian Guilherme Sandrini (equivalent to 301.45 wpm using the traditional definition for words per minute since this site defines a word as six characters rather than five) and 256 wpm (a record caught on video) on TypeRacer by American Sean Wrona, the inaugural Ultimate Typing Championship winner, which was considered the highest ever legitimate score ever set on the site, until Wrona claimed it has been surpassed. Both of these records are essentially sprint speeds on short text selections lasting much less than one minute and were achieved on the QWERTY keyboard. Wrona also maintained 174 wpm on a 50-minute test taken on hi-games.net, another online typing website to unofficially displace Blackburn as the fastest endurance typist, although disputes might still arise over differences in the difficulty of the texts as well as Wrona's use of a modern computer keyboard as opposed to the typewriter used by Blackburn.  Later, Michael DeRoche had broke Guilherme Sandrini's record at 265.78 wpm on July 2019 TypingZone master (about 318 wpm).

[jfkbengals]

The last typewriter my immediate family owned was a massive Brother electric model that had a serial port and an adapter that could connect it to a PC to be a daisy wheel printer. We never used it that way, as our Epson Demon dot matrix could print graphics as well as text, but the typewriter also was one of the only models that had a built in type correct feature. Basically it had a separate ribbon that was the same as the current Bic wite-out tape, and the unit would back up one place, pick up the correction ribbon into the position that the ink ribbon had been in and let you hit the incorrect character again, thus imprinting the correction tape over top of the fresh ink. It would then go back that space again so you could type the correct character. Kind of a neat function.

[*michaelsean*]

I’m calling foul on 300 words. That’s five words a second. Even if all the words are “a” I don’t think you can do it.

[George Cantstandya]

(11-08-2021, 05:07 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I’m calling foul on 300 words. That’s five words a second. Even if all the words are “a” I don’t think you can do it.

The only reason I even looked it up and replied was because my Aunt was a career typist.   She's in her early 80's now but from what I know she worked in a state government office in that field for I think about 40+ years before she retired.  But anyway from what I was told my Aunt tested in the 120's WPM during speed tests.  So that's why I found the 300 WPM claim extreme and decided to look it up. 

No offense to gramps.  Maybe you accidentally added a 0.   :)

[treee]

You can hit 300 wpm on a stenography keyboard

Quote:Modern-day stenographers use shorthand typing machines called stenotypes. These machine marvels allow stenographers to type at rates exceeding 300 words per minute.

[George Cantstandya]

(11-08-2021, 06:32 PM)treee Wrote: You can hit 300 wpm on a stenography keyboard

 Yes on a stenography keyboard, that's what they are made for and they use shorthand.  But a standard keyboard or typewriter as claimed 300 WPM is world record breaking.  

[*michaelsean*]

(11-08-2021, 06:32 PM)treee Wrote: You can hit 300 wpm on a stenography keyboard

For what purpose? Nobody talks that fast and it’s not like you can race ahead.

[Sled21]

Today's youts will never know the joy of using correction tape to cover a mistake.
Fun typwriter related fact: "Liquid Paper," the liquid correction paint that people used to correct typographical errors, was invented by Betty Nesmith Graham, who was an Executive Secretary at Texas Bank and Trust. She started her own company, which was then purchased by Gillette in 1979, for $47.5 million.($174.73 million in 2021 dollars) Her only son inherited half of her estate at the time of her death. That's a lot of money to "Monkee" around with......

[XenoMorph]

(11-08-2021, 05:07 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I’m calling foul on 300 words. That’s five words a second. Even if all the words are “a” I don’t think you can do it.

its probly 300 keystrokes a minute

[fredtoast]

My sister worked at a data entry job for a while and she got to where she could type over 100 WPM. That is 500 finger strokes a minute. It was crazy watching her type.

My first "word processor" looked like a typewriter and printed with a ball strike like a typewriter, but it had a small screen that displayed 3 lines of text at a time that I could edit/correct. I remember there was also a limit on the file size, so I would have to break up large projects into smaller pieces.

[fredtoast]

(11-09-2021, 09:57 AM)Sled21 Wrote: Today's youts will never know the joy of using correction tape to cover a mistake.
Fun typwriter related fact: "Liquid Paper," the liquid correction paint that people used to correct typographical errors, was invented by Betty Nesmith Graham, who was an Executive Secretary at Texas Bank and Trust. She started her own company, which was then purchased by Gillette in 1979, for $47.5 million.($174.73 million in 2021 dollars) Her only son inherited half of her estate at the time of her death. That's a lot of money to "Monkee" around with......

The very first day of my very first job as an attorney I was going through my new desk to see what needed to be cleaned out.  I found a bottle of "white out" but I could not tell if it was dried up or not.  I could not tell by shaking it because the stuff was so thick.  I took off the cap and was smelling to see if it was fresh when I looked up and saw one of the partners at my door waiting to introduce himself.  Back then people huffed White Out like huffing glue or paint.  So I was a bit concerned about my first impression on my boss.

[MileHighGrowler]

(11-09-2021, 01:59 PM)fredtoast Wrote: The very first day of my very first job as an attorney I was going through my new desk to see what needed to be cleaned out.  I found a bottle of "white out" but I could not tell if it was dried up or not.  I could not tell by shaking it because the stuff was so thick.  I took off the cap and was smelling to see if it was fresh when I looked up and saw one of the partners at my door waiting to introduce himself.  Back then people huffed White Out like huffing glue or paint.  So I was a bit concerned about my first impression on my boss.

And you've been huffing ever since 

[*Awful Llama*]

I do miss using a typewriter.  In one of my first jobs I would have to type up any one-off checks for employees that were receiving pay corrections.  Got to be pretty efficient at typing the checks and paystubs.  

I never did take a typing class.  In high school boys were not encouraged to enter the secretarial classes, though I'd be a much better typist today if I had taken a class.  And, hey nothing better for increasing your odds than being the only boy in a class full of girls.  

One thing I do not miss is having to change the ribbon and getting that red and black ink on your fingers.  You were a marked man for the rest of the day.  

[*rfaulk34*]

(11-07-2021, 02:04 PM)grampahol Wrote: Some of you youngins may have never experienced using a typewriter, especially one of the old manual types as opposed to an electric, but there is definitely a difference.  The biggest difference between using a plain computer keyboard and a manual or even electric typewriter is with a typewriter when you're composing a letter say to grandma or even in business when you get stuck in your train of thought it's much more likely you'll get very distracted using a computer simply because with a click of the mouse you can be on a completely different page looking at porn, football videos, shopping or any number of distractions. With a typewriter as your only means of putting words on paper those same distractions simply don't exist. A typewriter kind of forces the brain to concentrate much more focused.
I grew up using my mother's old Olympia manual, a great old machine and ribbons were far more cheaper than printer cartridges.
Now, computers are far more efficient when it comes to editing, correcting mistakes, spelling and so on. You can quickly change fonts and much more, but in terms of concentration and staying on task the old fashioned typewriter can't be beat. There's another factor often overlooked, the tactile feel of the snappy feel a well tuned mechanical typewriter has..and the little bell reminding you to hit the return lever..
So anyway, typewriters are making a huge comeback in certain circles. There are now large typewriter events taking place in cities all around the world with everything from buying and selling, trading and such to speed contests and more.. My wife can type MUCH faster than I can and I'm pretty quick for a 3 fingered typist, 2 for the letters and a thumb for the space bar..  She can type upwards of 300 words per minute..   That's scary..

So uhm. Do you mean 300 characters a minute? One "word" in typing is 4 keystrokes. 300 words would be 1200 keystrokes a minute or 20 keystrokes a second. That's all 10 fingers hitting the keyboard every second. 

I'm not saying you're hallucinating, i'm just saying that would have to crush a world record or something. 

I can type 74 words per minute and i always thought that was pretty damn fast for a locksmith. 

P.S. When my mother in law was in labor with my wife, my father in law insisted that they stop at the store to buy a new typewriter on the way to the hospital. My wife still has the typewriter. 

EDIT: Ok, so my senior typing class was 37 years ago. 1 word is 5 keystrokes apparently.

[grampahol]

She edits court reporter transcripts so she doesn't have to type the entire words.. Actually I don't really know.. But she's darn fast.. The only real point I was getting at is that those old manuals are becoming big time collectors items and there's a lot of people who want to go back to writing or typing directly on real paper. Anyone ever change the ribbon on an old manual? It's not particularly hard to do, but it does take some practice..  You gotta learn how to listen for the bell towards the end of a line and hit the carriage return to start a new line.. I always liked the ratcheting clicking noise when you put in a fresh sheet of paper. A well adjusted machine, especially high end typewriters have a definite snappy feel to them way moreso than a computer or even an electric or cheap manual.. We had an old Olympic manual that came directly from a newspaper office.. Great old machine.. 
I remember whiteout too as well as the whiteout tape you could hold over your mistakes and it would fill in the impression of letters. Great stuff if it was new and fresh. My sister was a really fast typist too. It would be like shes talking into a tape recorder playing it back at double speed while I was taping myself and playing it back at half speed.. Anyone remember turning an old vinyl record with your finger really slow then speeding it way up? LOL The joys of old technology when we were kids.. Spelling hell upside down on your mom or dads first old electronic calculator! 7734 if you've never tried.. 

[fredtoast]

Old manual cash registers are also big collector items. Some people are just fascinated by the old technology.

[grampahol]

(11-17-2021, 12:19 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Old manual cash registers are also big collector items. Some people are just fascinated by the old technology.

By chance remember any of the old cash registers at the big department stores with about 100 buttons? I worked at Rike's in Dayton for awhile years back and had to try to figure one of those monsters out. they had tons of options to them.. Similar to one like this except without the querty keyboard or carriage return at top.. I remember those same accounting machines up in the offices at Rike's as well..