Just a thought.

Somewhat fed up with staring at the screen, I printed off a few pages so
that I could lay on the bed and read in comfort and a slightly bizarre
thought came to me.

I wondered what it would have been like to print off a 75,000 word
manuscript on a five pin dot matrix printer.

And then I remembered my Corona (that was the model, can't remember the
make) daisy wheel printer, and I cringed at the idea of performing the
exercise on that machine. Lordy that was a noisy beast.

And then I thought, great merciful heavens, people used to type
manuscripts on TYPEWRITERS of all things. I have a feeling that my typing
skills are not up to using a typewriter. At least with a WP it beeps when
I miss a space or hit the wrong letter. And even if it didn't do that, I
could just select 'Check whole text' and let it go about it's business.

And then I thought of the real old days with quill pens and candles for
lighting.

And then I thought, thank you Charles Babbidge for inventing the computer.

david...

Yoj...

I agree. That is really annoying.

dear mick, as your senior by at least 20 decades.... I will speak to you
from the years of history... :-))
- to be able to print a large document on a 5-pin dot matrix printer was
a sheer delight... :) it meant not having to wait for some typist or
typists to work days and days and days to get the darn thing done... and
then to find a need to rework and retype the whole thing... noisy, but
efficient... and several of them were quite small. mine had a foot print
about the size of a an 8x11 sheet of paper. and i didn't have to pay a
fortune for ink cartridges... :-)) the secretary for dept had a bigger,
quieter, dot-matrix printer and it was faster. but to use it, i had to
copy document to a 5 1/4" floppy and ask her to print it when she wasn't
busy... was much preferred to have my own small noisy printer, instead.
it was a matter of choices... :) the dot-matrix printer gave me freedom
to print on demand. that was a real perk in 1983.

- when our son went to college we gave him a corona typewriter - an
electric model with the choice of white or blank ribbons for correction.
boy, did i envy our son... ... our home had nothing so grand...

- all of my college papers were done on an old royal typewriter. a heavy
beast and required strong fingers to make it move. and i typed slowly and
deliberately and didn't have to make massive corrections... and
professors knew of the difficulty of the typewriter and were not picky on
a few typos or other errors in presentation. and they didn't require
electricity either... :-)) and managers didn't demand that their
secretaries retype endless times as the manager tweaked a sentence here
and there. once typed, the document was done. with computers, the
document seems to never be done... ... i recall a secretary i knew in
the 80's, who had just been switched from a selectric typewriter to a PC
with multimate. the boss was no longer satisfied with a letter of good
content... now he wanted different type fonts, a graphic or two, border
around the page, header and footer, and multiple columns. where she once
could knock out a one page memo in 10 minutes or so, she was now
averaging 3-4 hours per memo to make them 'prettier'... :)) - and
quality of content went down...

- i agree - i couldn't survive without word processing software, but
that's only because the pace of life is so much faster. now when i attend
a meeting, people ask for charts, graphs, multi-color, embedded documents
and charts and weblinks and animation and expect to have in a day or
two.... life had some benefits when a typed document took a week... the
more features that are embedded into software, the more people will
demand them as the minimum acceptable...

OK, OK... i'm grumbling - but it's because i'm on a writing
assignment.... text needs to be perfect, multiple fonts, indentation, use
of bullets, color, bar charts, graphics, calculations, some animation,
indexed, table of contents, in print, in slides and on the web. once upon
a time... grumble, grumble,.... :)

NHunkele...

You really know how to make a person feel ancient. LOL
Norma - sharpening her quill

Yoj...

As a former secretary who had to use a typewriter, I heartily agree with
your sentiments. For four years, I worked for an attorney. Most of the
documents I typed needed from four to seven copies. Carbon copies. Each of
which had to be erased, along with the original, if I made an error. Wills
didn't have to be erased. You just took out the paper and started over,
even if the error was near the bottom of the page. Later I had another job
where I used a Correctible Selectric and a photocopier. That was a vast
improvement, but you still couldn't move a paragraph around the way you can
on a computer. I love my computer - when I'm not hating it, that is. ;-)

Yoj...

Yeah, with Microsoft you get an error message saying you need to fix an
error, but it doesn't give you a clue as to what the error might be. ;-)