Smashing the Typewriter

In 1979 or so, I was banging out a multi-page document on the old typewriter, with multiple carbon copies. (Correction fluid + carbon copies = lots of blowing and waiting or else white paint splotches on the carbon paper. Erasing really didn't work.) It was a much-used electric typewriter I had for a decade.

On the desk behind me was my then-new Radio Shack Model I computer - which did not yet have lower-case characters, much less a word-processor program or a printer attached, but I knew the potential for all of those was there.

On the typewriter, it was important to me that the document be as clean as I could make it. I got to page umpteen and realized I'd left a paragraph out of an early page.

I lost it, and furiously smashed my fist on the top of my old faithful machine until I'd dented the top in so that no keys could actually strike the paper. That was easy enough to bend back out, but I put the thing in its case, and headed over to the art table, eschewing writing altogether until I could get the computer up to processing and printing words.

Have never typewritered since. I ended up writing my own word processor software and getting one of those nasty printers that used silvered paper, until finally moving up to the real world of Word*Star and the clattering, huge, expensive daisy wheel printer.

I do have several typewriters, the old electric, and a couple of manual units, for all of which I need to get ribbons. For the post-EMP times. But I don't have any love for that technology.