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Mutley
22-11-2012, 12:12 AM
Britain's last ever typewriter has rolled off the assembly line at the Brother factory in Wales today.

Another piece of our history bites the dust. :sad:

I remember learning to type, though I cannot remember exactly which machine it was on.
There was the Corona, the Royal, the Underwood, the Remington and probably a few others. We had to type under a shelf which sat over the keyboard so we could learn to touch type without seeing the keys.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs. :lol:

I wonder how many of our female ancestors were typists back in the early 1900s, I suspect quite a few?

Lizzy9
22-11-2012, 12:40 AM
I never learned to type, wish I had as then my keyboard skills would be better. I'm OK with letters and numbers it's the other keys I struggle with. Practice does make perfect though; I'll never be perfect :wink5: but I may eventually master the keyboard.

Sad isn't it, when something we were used to seeing daily is no longer useful, but hey that's progress.

Nicolina
22-11-2012, 12:44 AM
Back in the 60's, I learned on an "Imperial 66" and another phrase we had to type was:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

Colin Rowledge
22-11-2012, 1:13 AM
Back in the 60's, I learned on an "Imperial 66" and another phrase we had to type was:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

When I worked for a newspaper c. 1959, I had to learn to type.

The course started with learning the letters -Q.W.E.R.T.Y. And then ;.L.K.J.H.. Then we progressed to a phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Never could handle that lot, so was transferred to being assistant to the reporter who covered court cases. He was fine in the morning, but after a liquid lunch, I had to take over the reporting. So I developed my own form of writing short-hand, but it wasn't Pitman [with squiggles] but resembles what we see today as text-messaging.

Wish I had patented the idea before being canned in 1961.

susan-y
22-11-2012, 2:05 AM
Nicolina and Mutley..

I remember both those phrases. I only took one year of typing in high school as our school system was set up for either university bound or business bound and I was in the university bound. However it was felt we should have typing skills because we would certainly need them. Our individual keys were covered with caps so we couldn't see the letters and once we got on to 50? ( I think that's what it was) words a minute the covers came off......

Sue.

I would not have wanted to be the teacher having to cover all those typewriter keys in the classroom. It used to very disheartening hearing the "bing" as someone finished a line and you knew they were much faster than you.|dunce2|

bamagirl
22-11-2012, 3:01 AM
I'm reminded of the Jerry Lewis routine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxm0TN5WDQI

Barb

BayHorse
22-11-2012, 12:33 PM
I had typing lessons in 1981, alongside my A levels. Being a girl, I was made to. Touch-typing is useful when internetting in the dark, but I never needed that extra qualification.

The attic is full of archaic typewriters, too, with chewed-up ribbon. Wonder if they're worth anything?

Hilda Woodley
22-11-2012, 12:53 PM
Did typing on a manual typewriter at school in the late 60's, during the course of the next 40 years my first job I had an electric Italian brand and I hated it, another job I broke three carriage returns on my electric typewriters (name escapes me now) then my boss got me a Golfball - WOW best electric typewriter ever for me because I type at 100 words a minute so it was easier to type than take down dictation, which I could not read back anyway, so generally my bosses used a dictaphone. I had the speed up so high my bosses always sounded like they were on helium - those were the days!!! Then came the computer, that's even better at responding to my fast fingers and I luv mine with a passion.

Jan1954
22-11-2012, 1:12 PM
I have just had a look at the Typewriter Museum website (thank you, Mutley :smile5:) and found the one that I learned to type upon: the Remington Standard 10, built in 1913. :biggrin5: It was obtained from a jumble sale when I was in my early teens and I never had a lesson, being self-taught.

As I also played the piano, I have been told that I type like a pianist...... :wink5:

Nicolina
22-11-2012, 2:18 PM
that's reminded me of a trick we were taught. Imagine a piece of music playing and type to that. There were some strange tempos at times.

Colin Rowledge
22-11-2012, 2:28 PM
As I also played the piano, I have been told that I type like a pianist...... :wink5:

This comment brought memories of my mum flooding back and I would like to share some of those.

For Christmas 1931, her father bought a piano for the house and so her older Stanley had lessons [he was 13] and mum [aged 10] wanted to learn. After his lessons he showed mum and she started playing as well. She became quite good and by 1936 she had aspirations of becoming a Concert Pianist. This unfortunately didn't happen as the private school fees were beyond the ability of her parents to meet and so she took up typing and shorthand and those skills stayed with her all her working life [both in England and in Canada.

The piano was sold after the death of my mum's mother in 1953

One year sometime in the late 1970's we were at an Antique Show and there was a dealer from Guelph who had player-piano's. Mum once again felt the urge to get one and by 1981 she had her toy. She bought about 50 piano rolls. After her retirement and while dad was still working, she would, on a warm summer day, open the windows at home and play - play - for several hours a day. The neighbours loved it.

She continued to play for herself and friends throughout the 1980's and early 1990's but her health forced to stop playng. Our daughter took to it like a 'duck to water' and that player-piano [originally built in Ottawa in 1920] is now gracing my home.

When my mum passed away on 13 February 2002, I played it at the reception we had at home after her funeral. In 2008 when our daughter married, I played again at the party [at home] before we left for the reception. I felt, both then and now, that mum enjoyed the occasions as she watched over us.

Colin

Mutley
22-11-2012, 7:08 PM
That's a lovely story Colin, thanks for sharing.

I think I learnt on an Imperial, same as Nicolina.
I also remember the golf ball but I hated it, having to keep changing the balls because I was a font nut, still am. :smile5:

Do you remember the old Tippex correction paint? (though I think it is still sold today)
then they brought out the little bits of paper that you placed under the key, backspaced and hit hard.

According to The Guinness Book of World Records a Barbara Blackburn was clocked at a peak speed of 212 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard on a typewriter. Computer QWERTY keyboard speeds are even higher!

malcolm99
22-11-2012, 7:32 PM
Do you remember the old Tippex correction paint? (though I think it is still sold today)
then they brought out the little bits of paper that you placed under the key, backspaced and hit hard.



And did you type out stencils for duplicating and get through pints of that pink correcting fluid? (Well I was a student fuelled by beer and magazine deadlines...).

JohnN
22-11-2012, 7:48 PM
I am long retired now, but it must have been twenty five years ago, when I had to find a new typist for our office.
One girl, straight from high school, seemed to have the right qualifications, so I sat her down at the typewriter, gave her a letter to copy and left her to it. Five minutes later I came back to see how she had got on.
She was sitting there, looking puzzled, with nothing typed.
'I can't find the "On" switch!' she explained.
Poor girl had never seen a manual typewriter before!

Mutley
22-11-2012, 7:56 PM
And did you type out stencils for duplicating and get through pints of that pink correcting fluid? (Well I was a student fuelled by beer and magazine deadlines...).

The Gestetner
patented in 1879 and I was still using one over 100 years later!

pottoka
02-12-2012, 7:05 AM
I saw this piece of news on Have I Got News For You? where they presented it with their usual irreverence, but it is a sad day. They did say that the very last typewriter made went to a museum - I'm afraid I can't remember which one - which I thought was a good idea.


Did typing on a manual typewriter at school in the late 60's, during the course of the next 40 years my first job I had an electric Italian brand and I hated it, another job I broke three carriage returns on my electric typewriters (name escapes me now) then my boss got me a Golfball - WOW best electric typewriter ever for me because I type at 100 words a minute so it was easier to type than take down dictation, which I could not read back anyway, so generally my bosses used a dictaphone. I had the speed up so high my bosses always sounded like they were on helium - those were the days!!! Then came the computer, that's even better at responding to my fast fingers and I luv mine with a passion.

I did a secretarial course after university and happened to sit at the desk with the golfball typewriter when we first went in to the room. It actually rather scared me!

I never learned to touch-type properly (even though I got the diplomas at the end of the year) and it didn't help that I then moved to France where the keyboards are AZERTY not QUERTY. Now that I move back and forth between the two countries, I seem to type more and more slowly, and there are certain keys that I just cannot find ... or are in the wrong darn place!

Mutley, what keyboards are used in Portugal?

sueannbowen
02-12-2012, 9:49 AM
I did shorthand and typing as being a girl was not deemed fit for anything else. I got thrown out of shorthand for cheating. apparently my version of shorthand was not an acceptable alternative to Pitman's! Even so, I still type really fast (using most fingers) and am an absolute whizz on the number pad of a keyboard. That is because I once worked as an auditor and in the days before BT provided digital telephone records had to manually enter a year's worth of outgoing calls made from a large hospital into a spreadsheet. We suspected fraud and boy oh boy were we right.

Allblack
02-12-2012, 12:26 PM
Found this chatter very interesting - I learned on an Olivetti (I think) in NZ in the early 1960's - the same methods and phrases must have been used internationally. I remember the absolute satisfaction of slamming that carriage back at the end of the line if I was mad about something!!!!! In the 1980's a friend told me how all the typewriters had been removed and replaced with word processors in a govt dept - and within weeks many of the typists were on sick leave with R S I. I recall thinking that the 'old' typewriters never gave us RSI no matter how quick we were - such varied action. We had an old "L C Smith" at home to play with. I think I could find an old ribbon in my junk even now, if I dared to look! Cheers. Allblack

Coromandel
02-12-2012, 1:08 PM
It all changed so quickly! My one and only office job was as a copy editor for a publisher in 1990-1993. In 1990 we had to edit authors' typescripts in red pen and mark them up with instructions for the typesetters; then they were retyped, introducing a new set of errors. There was just one computer in the office, recently purchased to deal with the occasional floppy disc sent in with the typescript.

By the time I left in 1993 everyone had a computer on their desk, most of the authors sent in floppy discs with their typescripts and (if we could open the files!) we would do the editing 'on screen' in a primitive version of Microsoft Word. Some pioneering souls even e-mailed their papers to us.

When I arrived in 1990 there was still a typing pool in the office. I had to write letters by hand, then put them in the queue to be typed up. By 1993 only the bosses had secretaries and everyone else had to produce their own letters in Word.

Back in the eighties I had produced my own thesis on the university mainframe via a 'workstation' (using something called sqtroff if I remember rightly). It was very laborious to put in any formatting like superscripts.

Even further back in the 1970s I was in the last year at my school to have to use a slide rule and log tables in my maths O-level. The year afterwards my sister was allowed to use a calculator. That's cheating! Mind you, I would have no idea what to do with a log table these days.

Mutley
02-12-2012, 10:10 PM
Mutley, what keyboards are used in Portugal?

Portuguese ones! Sorry, had to say it :smile5:
Seriously.
We use a QWERTY keyboard but have some different characters and require diacriticals (accents). E.g. ã é á â ç
To get the tilde over the a, I hit the tilde key ~ and then hit a. It then does it automatically.

I tried to find a picture of my keyboard but looked at loads and none were the same. It seems to be the shape of the Enter key that denotes where the accent keys fit. My keyboard has the arrow on the widest part of the Enter key at the bottom and most I found had the arrow and widest part at the top. I've just spent some time looking at all the different keyboards around the world and am amazed how many variations there are. Made a change from looking for Granddad!

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r297/MutleyBG/UKKeyboard.jpg

http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r297/MutleyBG/KeyboardPT.jpg

pottoka
03-12-2012, 1:04 AM
Portuguese ones! Sorry, had to say it :smile5:
Seriously.
We use a QWERTY keyboard but have some different characters and require diacriticals (accents). E.g. ã é á â ç
To get the tilde over the a, I hit the tilde key ~ and then hit a. It then does it automatically.


Portuguese ones ... I asked for that :rofl:

I have accents, too (I'm not posh) with the tilde, the circumflex and an extra acute accent as well as the è and à. They're all double key jobs like you say, Mutley. I thought I didn't have an umlaut which is weird because it exists as a French accent, but when I found a picture of my keyboard, it shows one, and I was pretty sure the PC has one, but my laptop has a " on the key. However, when called into action, it prints an umlaut.

http://i1275.photobucket.com/albums/y446/FourFrogs/CLAVIER.gif

One slightly annoying thing is that you have to hit Shift to get a full stop, although I suppose there is a logic to it if you consider that the next letter will probably be a capital.

When I'm settled to one keyboard and move to another, I find the @ key annoying, too (it doesn't take much to get me going!). On the French keyboard, it needs the Alt Gr key! I didn't mind so much until my email server "improved" things and removed my icon where I could store all my email addresses.

Question: does anyone know why the letter 'a' is out in the cold when it's a rather useful letter and would surely be better somewhere in the middle where it would get a good thump from an index finger rather than a slight brush from the left little finger, when 90% of us are right-handed?

Jan1954
03-12-2012, 6:23 AM
Question: does anyone know why the letter 'a' is out in the cold when it's a rather useful letter and would surely be better somewhere in the middle where it would get a good thump from an index finger rather than a slight brush from the left little finger, when 90% of us are right-handed?Wikipedia says that the origin is unknown but that it was based upon the QWERTY keyboard. There is a bit of history at: http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY

secretary-again
03-12-2012, 12:19 PM
I learned to type in 1954 on a manual and got up quite a speed by the time I went to Commercial College in 1955 where I stayed for a year (also learning Pitman shorthand). I got up to 165 words a minute typing and 180 words a minute shorthand.
Incidentally, when I was learning shorthand we were encouraged to listen to, and take down in shorthand, the BBC news as they spoke at approximately 100 words per minute!

RoyW
03-12-2012, 8:24 PM
Reading this thread reminded me of when I started work in 1961 and wondered if anyone still remembers the Comptometer Operators? As with typists they had a remarkable skill of using their machines to do calculations and hold a conversation at the same time me I had trouble with a NCR add list machine.

Mutley
03-12-2012, 9:26 PM
When I'm settled to one keyboard and move to another, I find the @ key annoying, too (it doesn't take much to get me going!). On the French keyboard, it needs the Alt Gr key! I didn't mind so much until my email server "improved" things and removed my icon where I could store all my email addresses.
The Portuguese keyboard also requires the Alt Gr key for all of the 3rd characters on the number keys. I've become used to that now, right thumb and left forefinger. Strangely, the UK keyboards did not seem to have any three character keys.

It was also interesting that text on your keyboard was in French and mine in English. Perhaps mine is only half Portuguese. :smile5:


Question: does anyone know why the letter 'a' is out in the cold when it's a rather useful letter and would surely be better somewhere in the middle where it would get a good thump from an index finger rather than a slight brush from the left little finger, when 90% of us are right-handed?

I wish it was elsewhere. I have arthritis in my left little finger, it is twisted to fit exactly over the shift key. Certainly slows me down.

pottoka
03-12-2012, 10:02 PM
The Portuguese keyboard also requires the Alt Gr key for all of the 3rd characters on the number keys. I've become used to that now, right thumb and left forefinger. Strangely, the UK keyboards did not seem to have any three character keys.

It was also interesting that text on your keyboard was in French and mine in English. Perhaps mine is only half Portuguese. :smile5:


Right thumb and right forefinger for @ for me - it's on t'other side of the keyboard!

No 3-character keys? That's their loss and our gain :biggrin5:

I looked at more than one picture of keyboards purporting to be French before settling for that one. It's more or less right but there is Shift and Backspace written on the appropriate keys in English - mon Dieu, quelle horreur ! Swooning at the Académie Française.

pottoka
03-12-2012, 10:19 PM
Wikipedia says that the origin is unknown but that it was based upon the QWERTY keyboard. There is a bit of history at: http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY

That's an interesting article, Jan, especially for Anglo-Saxons who want to use accents. I once had a bit of paper with the keys for some Spanish letters with accents, but, being a bit of paper, it got lost, of course.

I still think the 'a' is in a silly place (and Mutley seems to agree). I bet it was put there by a man seeing as the majority of people using typewriters were women - like all the kitchens I've ever had could only have been designed by men who knew nothig about what happens in a real kitchen!

A friend of mine has a very old typewriter. All the letters are in a semi-circle where the keyboard would be, and there's a lever which has to be moved to the letter you want before pressing the button. I can't imagine anyone working up any speed on it!

Nicolina
03-12-2012, 10:56 PM
if the A is where the Q should be, where have they put that?
As some-one who often has to write in German I downloaded a little programme (several years ago) called Umlauta that allowed me to include the "extra" letters.
As for the one with letters in a semi-circle, I seem to remember a kids typewriter like that.

Mutley
03-12-2012, 11:18 PM
Did you know?
The AT sign, @, in Portugal is called the Arroba. It is still used as a unit of weight in the Cork trade and now means 15 kilograms.

It was originally used as an accounting abbreviation meaning "at the rate of" (so many items @ such and such = such and such). I think, in other countries also.

It was on the old typewriter keyboards from about 1900, long before email addresses were ever thought of. :smile5:

pottoka
04-12-2012, 9:16 AM
Did you know?
The AT sign, @, in Portugal is called the Arroba. It is still used as a unit of weight in the Cork trade and now means 15 kilograms.


In French, it's called "arobase", with its roots in Spanish or Portuguese. However, cork appears to be weighed in grams and kilograms ... and the prevailing use of screw-top bottles and plastic "corks", both of which are no good for wine which needs to breathe, is having a devastating effect on the cork-oak forests here. But that's another problem!


Did you know?

It was originally used as an accounting abbreviation meaning "at the rate of" (so many items @ such and such = such and such). I think, in other countries also.



I knew that! I don't know how or why, but I did (smug smile).

pottoka
04-12-2012, 9:20 AM
if the A is where the Q should be, where have they put that?


The Q and the A are transposed; see Mutley's post #20 and mine #21 for pictures.

Mutley
04-12-2012, 8:19 PM
What about this little beauty then?
http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r297/MutleyBG/1895typewriter.jpg

malcolm99
04-12-2012, 8:40 PM
...and you can get a ribbon for it in any colour - as long as it's black!

Mutley
05-12-2012, 12:22 AM
:smilielol5: