In 2012, a podcast host who wanted to interview Tom Hanks sent a 1934 Smith Corona to the actor as a gift when requesting the interview. Within days, Hanks responded with this letter, typed on the Corona: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/damn-you-all-to-hell.ht...
Last year I had a revelation while reading Gore Vidal that all my favorite books almost without exception had been written on typewriters. I immediately went to Ebay and bought two: an Olivetti and a Olympia.
I think Mr. Hanks missed one salient point of why bothering to type on an old machine still may play a valuable role to the writer in the modern age----------Silence.
I found there is a vast difference sitting in front of any computer compared to a typewriter. Mechanical typewriters are not alive. They do not have an internal CPU constantly cycling and doing things, constantly prodding you for attention with little indicators and wifi meters and clocks and things. Computers are needy. They are constantly trying to distract you, even when they are doing absolutely nothing. Typewriters on the other hand, are doing absolutely nothing. They are merely empty mechanical contraptions with no life in them whatsoever. What you find when typing is -- well, at least what I found -- is that you are left alone with your thoughts and the workings of your mind and nothing else but the silence of the room. This might be the first time in fifteen years you have experienced this sensation. It was odd at first and slightly uncomfortable. But I found that when writing narrative fiction, the words are totally uninhibited. They are not forced. You are not churning away as if you are a member of a large electronic industrial machine: society, but instead are left in quiet solace with nothing but you and the table, the stillness of the dust floating in the air and this solid bit of metal under your palms, and they are utterly quiet, and you can think, as if for the first time. It is a miraculous sensation.
I urge anyone to try it who has been steeped in tech for the last decade or two.
You nailed it in the best way I can think of. Owned an Olivetti as a gift, and wrote quite a lot of sheets on it. Thoughts flow more relax, very suitable for creative writing. I loved it so much that even went on to create an app to mimic the typing experience.
Here is an interesting story regarding the app. I manually typed one of Hanks' letter (from letters of note) to serve as screenshot, and then after a few months, received a letter from Hanks' lawyer, asking me to take it down. So I took it down, thinking, how did they know. Fast forward about 1 year, then Hanks himself released one app, featuring similar typing experience. This guy really care about typewriters.
Heck, I swear I used to be a more creative coder back before I got internet. No inhibitions about having written something that already exists. No pressure to keep up with the latest and greatest whatever. I really only can get back to that now when using less-popular languages whose development is complete (e.g. TLA+).
As a person who handles mail for a living I can assure you a typewritten letter, or should I say envelope, is a sure-fire way to have somebody open the letter.
I once used a typewriter to ask a large Ranch technological Training Company company if they had any scholarships for old-time programmers ( I was one) who were out of the game for a decade or so.
I was told my letter was passed around like a novelty and - yes I did receive the scholarship and was able to learn iOS 4. (And learn about HN)
I can assure you a typewritten letter, or should I say envelope, is a sure-fire way to have somebody open the letter.
It's interesting that you say that, as I'm a consultant who does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious). We send fee quote letters via email but we also send snailmail letters that arrive a day or two later. Potential clients often make their decisions before the letters arrive, but sometimes those letters jar indecisive potential clients into making a decision, and sometimes those letters sit on their desks for months until another grant opportunity comes along. A physical letter and card are often easier to find and sort than voluminous email.
This might not feasible for high-volume businesses, but it's been very effective for us. The email follow-up arrives the same day, and the physical letter a few days after that.
I bet you use a real stamp too that has to be "pasted" on. First class letters get forwarded too.
I throw so many letters "away" (UBBM) and the sender has no idea it never made it.
Plus many people don't open theor mail right away or they are away from their house for a long period Of time. A first class letter that doesn't look machine-made is always an intriguing "open"
>Computer keyboards make a mousy tappy tap tappy tap like ones you hear in a Starbucks — work may be getting done but it sounds cozy and small, like knitting needles creating a pair of socks.
I wonder if he's tried a mechanical keyboard? He might like it quite a bit better, even if just for the fact that you can choose your personality of keyboard with your computer, just like he does with typewriters.
As someone who restores older Teletype machines, I get to type on a real mechanical keyboard. It's a strange experience at first. When you press a key, it locks down for 200ms while the mechanism cycles. During this period, no other key can be pressed; the other keys are physically blocked. You can't press two keys at once; that, too, is mechanically interlocked. Efficient typing on these machines requires typing at a fixed speed of 5 keystrokes per second. It's like playing a piano; rhythm matters.
In the pre-1930 Teletype machines, the keys are ordinary Underwood typewriter keys. If you type too fast, you blunt your fingers against the immovable keys. In 1930, Teletype switched over to spring-loaded keycaps, with about 1mm of spring motion in case you hit a key before the machine is ready. This made fast typing much more comfortable.
Western Union expected their Teletype operators to be able to type "blind", with no display or printer to see what they were typing. Outbound operators often used a machine with a keyboard and a tape punch only - no printer. Here's one at work.[1] The machine she's using doesn't have the 5 keystroke per second limitation - notice the loop of tape between the keyboard machine and the tape reader. That's buffering. Operators were expected to type without errors, of course.
> Western Union expected their Teletype operators to be able to type "blind", with no display or printer to see what they were typing.
My aunt taught typing at a girls' high school in the '80s. She was amazingly fast - she bought a typewriter with a memory, and I recall her being finished with a typewritten letter when the page was only one-third of the way through 'printing'. Had to wait for it to finish each time before loading in the next letter.
Later in the '80s she got a job as a temp and was working on a computer. Boss comes in and sees here just staring motionless at it: "What are you doing, why aren't you working?". Her response was "I'm just waiting for the computer to catch up". The boss went over to look, and sure enough, the computer was still bringing up what she typed onto the screen...
Heck, even into the mid 90's, my mother would type so fast into Microsoft Word on Windows 95 that she'd have to pause and wait for the computer to catch up to where she'd typed!
I'm curious about this anecdote. PCs, even into the early 90s, had a keyboard buffer that was only a few dozen characters long, at most. I know because I'd frequently hit it and had learned to stop when I heard the first beep and pick right up where I left off without losing a character once it had time to finish flushing. I don't know of any system where you could have typed enough in advance that you'd have to sit long enough for this conversation to transpire.
That said, maybe this could be the case if it was a dumb terminal connected to a unix server and it was buffering in the network stack?
I wonder if this is the reason for a generation of two-finger typists? It's not that "old people are incapable of learning to type", just that they grew up with systems which were physically incapable of handling faster input so there was no point until after muscle memory made it too hard to change?
This is one reason UNIX commands are so short (mv, ls, cp, etc.). It would have really added up to type longer commands on the 200ms teletype keystrokes.
Teletype is why the terminal in UNIX is abbreviated tty.
Would that requirement for accuracy and speed include telegrams encoded using a commercial code such as the acme?
Arbitrary key combinations strike me as harder to type fluently by feel compared to my native language. Following the piano playing analogy mentioned somewhere up the tree playing a melody in a definite key signature is easier than a 12-tone composition!
I once found a commercial code in the Stanford library stacks. Common business phrases were encoded as four-syllable worlds. In the book was a loose piece of typewritten paper stating that after a cutoff date, the telegraph company would charge extra for non-dictionary words. This made the code worthless.
While I'm a big fan and owner of 3+ mechanical keyboards, the force required to type out highly legible letters on a typewriter is not comparable with any keyboard.
It's not even in the same ballpark. Especially if your "ink tape" or whatever it's called isn't new, you really have to bang on the keys to get them to show up, not to mention the action lever to go to a new line.
I'm glad you mention that, because I just sent a letter to the editor about Unicomp's mechanical keyboards (https://jakeseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-cu...), which are modern versions of the IBM Model M. If Hanks hankers for that sound, he'd probably like one.
I was seriously considering a mod for one of my Model M keyboards -- attach a solenoid with a counter weight on it to the inside bottom of the keyboard case, and have it actuate on each keystroke. Just to simulate the old Selectric typewriters.
I'm very interested in this phenomenon where people seem to idolize certain outdated, analog technology. It seems to be some reaction against, or coping mechanism for, the increasingly digital world. I have a lot of fuzzy thoughts on it, and I'd like to read a book or an article that unpacks the idea more thoroughly.
The article makes a very astute point: that people are attracted to the physicality, the tangibility of "analog" things. Whether out of nostalgia (because we've been there) or retro fascination (when we haven't lived it firsthand), we can develop an emotional connection with a single physical objects that succinctly and permanently hold an abstract concept in a physical package -- like a letter, a book, a music record, or a photograph.
In the digital world so much of what we produce, consume, and interact with has no physical manifestation what we can strongly identify with. The computer is an abstract filing cabinet which can display what you're looking for on its own screen, or plays abstract 'music files', or streams 'video' from subscription apps. We're essentially asking the computer to recall these things from its "memory", and luckily, they remember with exact accuracy much more than a human would. While we can experience these things, we can't hold them in our hand; we can't share them in a self-contained, self-describing form (like handing someone a book) -- if we can share them at all.
I think as related sensation is the feeling of control, or at least understanding, over our technology. You can see exactly how a typewriter works; each letter you type is a direct result of your action, through a clear causal chain. When you type on a computer, letters appear on your screen through a much more convoluted process we take as magic, and especially for someone unused to the technology, that can lead to a feeling of loss of control.
Those objects are collectable, timeless and perfect for what they do. It's not like buying a laptop, which is useless a decade or two later. In my opinion, the older you get the more you appreciate stuff that lasts. Especially if you face hardship at some point and see the world for what it really is.
and markedly more backwards- and forwards-compatible than anything digital. We can read plays from the 1600s, or essays on how to build a government from the 1780s.
We can admire art from thousands of years ago, and people thousands of years in the future will be able to hold developed photographs of us in their hands and readily perceive it, while JPEG/EXIF file format will, without conscious intervention, will sink into near-complete obscurity.
When we die, how do we pass on our digital possessions? Do Facebook's, Instagram's datacenters, full of pictures of now-dead twenty- and thirty-somethings, will have to purge inactive accounts one day. Will our kids inherit our iTunes library even though they have their own? Do we pass 1000-game heirloom Steam accounts to our grandkids?
Morbid, I know, but the tangibility of physical, 'real-world' objects exudes a more reliable aura of permanence than that of digital content. Even if our descendants hold a garage sale the very next day, at least the world is made aware of our stuff, and it doesn't just spin away on a hard drive somewhere, forgotten.
You've just made a very astute point. I've been thinking for some time now that we are reaching a critical mass of technology. An era when people will start to become bored and detached from technology, and yearn for something tangible, and able to wrap their heads around. For me the allure of a typewriter is the fact that I can see how it works, I can fix it myself, and I can tinker with it.
I picked up one myself in the past year, and find that for notetaking it's very much what I prefer these days. There's the old running-out-of-ink problem (this pen lays down a thick line, and even with a refillable cartridge, typically needs filling daily with heavy use, every few days if I'm slowing down).
The writing though is clear and preferable to other implements. Ballpoints are atrocious, rollerballs only slightly tolerable.
As a musician, I've recently started working with analog synthesizers. Digital synths tend to be very alienating devices, at least for me - you don't really program them, you just select a preset that sounds kind of like what you want. Software synths even more so. Then I picked up an Arturia Microbrute, and the visceral thrill of twisting knobs to get the sounds really turned me on! There are no presets. Want to repeat something? Figure out how you did it before, or put an overlay on the keyboard and mark it with ink to get the knob positions. And because knob-twisting is such a part of it, I find myself altering the sounds in realtime. As a guitarist, that sort of intimate tonal control is much more familiar to me.
Yeah i wonder how much of it has to do with instant feedback. Turning that knob or throwing that switch tells you without seeing what you have done. With touch, or key combos, you often have to glance at a screen to tell if it actually went through or not.
I think a similar thing is at play with people's love for the modem handshake squeal.
I could be considered one of those people and, at least in my case, it is not in opposition to the digital world (which I also love, actually) at all.
For me, the difference between a typewriter and a computer, or a slide rule and a modern calculator, for example, is like the difference between a painting and a photograph. Of course the photograph is more accurate and it is not practical to make an oleo painting to remember where I parked the car, and there are very beautiful photographs, but I will always appreciate a Vermeer and will prefer it to a photograph of the same landscape.
There will continue to be lots of examples of preserving the best of analog technology in the digital world.
One example is an app that I built that lets authors sign ebooks (Authorgraph: http://www.authorgraph.com). This idea was a result of doing more and more reading on my Kindle but missing the experience of meeting authors and having them sign my books.
Maybe, but I don't think so. I haven't figured out what the root cause is but I love high quality pens and paper, and I love mechanical keyboards. I just like high quality input devices. There's something very satifying about the physical feel of this kind of thing. I think if I were born earlier I'd be into typewriters instead of mechanical keyboards.
With regard to analog music, ie record players, I have some understanding. There's something novel about having a unique item, where it gets worn and changes. It's yours. It's physical. It's sensual [1].
You can give it away. You can loan it to a friend. Your friend can have the same record and yet ... it is different.
There is something special about having an analog night -- putting on the record player and reading a book.
Computers are distracting, and working with them as a rather easily distracted person is often not so productive. Even more so with Internet. Thus as an aspiring author and philologist I use it as a device for gathering, storing and manipulating information, and use pen and paper for creative activities. The limits are all physical and tools simplest, so all I have to, and can do is to transfer my thoughts on paper. Then I type them with a typewriter for having a product that lends itself better to editing and being read later, as my personal handwriting is, a bit too personal. Having it written on a typewriter again helps me avoid distraction. Then I edit my draft and retype if need be. I find that screen editing is mire prone to hide or produce malformed paragraphs, typoes, incontinuities and the like, as I tend to read what surrounds my edits. But the review&rewrite approach requires me to review each time I want to commit my edits writing anew the manuscript. I am more productive this way.
Furthermore, it's way more fulfilling to have created a physical form of my thoughts, that can exist as an object. It's more pleasing to handle paper, reread my work and edit it freeform with a pen. I feel more engaged, and I have a better memory of what I write on paper that what I write on computer.
I don't know if this situation has any backing research but I guess making such research would be yet another unnecessary distraction for me as a creative.
For what it's worth, when referring to a thing as outdated, one needs to ask himself, "is it, really?" Is a digital successor of an analogue or mechanical gadget able to produce a strict superset of the effects of the latter? I think, in photography, music, plastic arts and literature the answer is no. And unless the answer is yes, the gadget is not outdated. Even if ninety nine hundredths of the effects are reproduced, and many new are added, for that one hundredth of the effect, the older tool is still valid, more so if that's what the author is wanting.
Besides, today's things have less glory and object presence attached to them than their older counterparts. It's normal to want that and seek that I think.
I feel a tinge of what you describe every time I look at my collection of old computers, but that tinge falls into the ether when I realize that there is no such thing as an old computer, just old users. Technology doesn't just stop working because its unfashionable - really, technology will continue to work in the physical world, for as long as it is functionally operational.
It is the user who decides how useful something is, and really: its only a decision.
Some of the pictures are amazing. I got to see her a few weeks ago doing a live "typing" event drawing out pictures of children jumping around. It was amazing how fast she typed and how good he pictures were.
Writing a letter on an old type writer is like sending Morse Code with a straight key. You manually form each character into words. There's nothing really like it.
Human to human (conversation), pen to paper (letter), metal to metal (type writer or straight key). Everything else is too impersonal and abstract. Too far removed from being human.
Interesting (I'd never heard of this), though pricey.
Strangely, I'd prefer a plain keyboard (w/o a screen) where I could type (for journaling) and have what I type be saved. I suppose this could be easily done with a wireless keyboard connected to my phone. People would think I was crazy, though, seeing me type on a computer keyboard without a computer in view.
Brilliant. Great little article. Doubt it will do much to overall typewriter usage (I also don't think that is his point, really) but you have to admire his passion.
Doubt it will do much to overall typewriter usage (I also don't think that is his point, really) but you have to admire his passion.
I also doubt it'll increase typewriter usage, but a while ago I saw The Atlantic's review of this device: "The Future of Writing Looks Like the Past: The Freewrite, a 'smart typewriter,' wants to liberate writers from their computers," which looks intriguing (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/freewr...). At $500 it seems a bit pricey, but I've talked to many writers who complain of relentless distraction from the notifications on regular computers, and I wonder if the Freewrite is a possible solution to that problem.
Myself, I'm fond of Freedom (https://freedom.to/) for quieting the temptation to log in, but I can see the appeal of alternatives.
I have an IBM Selectric that I bought from a Goodwill for $13. It's in near perfect condition.
I can't use it because people can hear it clear across the house. It makes the cats hide. It definitely makes your writer's block very apparent to everyone in earshot; that's embarrassing and leads to filling that silence with "All work and no play..."
That said, it types like a dream. Very few keyboards I've ever used come close (the original PC keyboard is probably the closest in feel). The problem with all of these is that your typing makes the people around you want to murder you.
I have high hopes for the KeyboardIO split keyboard. We'll see :-)
I work one day a week at a place where I am the only one who has a mechanical keyboard. It's not even a loud one ('cherry brown' switches). But I sit down and start working, and I'll occasionally hear someone say "Oh, is it Thursday already?", my presence announced by my keyboard-bashing...
Going off at a bit of a tangent here, but this reminds me of something that I find quite interesting:
I believe history has it that the querty keyboard layout was intentionally designed to slow down the typing speed, because the mechanical efficiency of the first gen/early typewriters (1860/70?) was fairly low, causing the moving prongs to jam if typing was done rapidly.
I also believe the dvorak layout (which got invented later and never gained much popularity) allows measurably faster typing (never used it myself). I think the older Apple keyboards used to have a qwerty/dvorak switch on the backside. Any dvorak users/fans here, I wonder?
I learned Dvorak as a teenager and I've been using it ever since. Obviously I can't use it all the time, since it's not worth setting up on other people's computers, iPads don't support it for the onscreen keyboard, and similar, but I use it on my computers. I think it's faster, and more importantly it's more comfortable since there's less movement involved. It's sometimes inconvenient, as keyboard shortcuts which make sense for QWERTY are sometimes weird for Dvorak, but overall I'm glad I made the switch. I don't have any real trouble using QWERTY when I need to, either. It takes me a minute or so to get back up to speed, then I'm fine.
> more importantly it's more comfortable since there's less movement involved
This is far more important for me. Even typing a couple of words on Qwerty feels uncomfortable.
Assuming your keyboard is Qwerty, try typing
"feels uncomfortable"
"yddp; flismysokanpd"
The second line is the keys you'd type if your layout was Dvorak. Notice only two letters are on the bottom row, and the top→bottom pair is an unusual letter combination (MF) rather than very common ones (UN, OM). The hand alternation is also more even, with at most two letters typed on the same hand, compared to Qwerty's four:
I went through a phase in my late teens where I used an old typewriter to record my screeds on life, politics and technology. It was fun to get that rythm going with the keys clattering and the hammers indenting. It made it feel like you were really writing something important (I would italicize but for the phone).
I guess I was a hipster before hipster was a thing. I might have to dig through my files and see if I still have any of it...
I might record the Olympia SM9 when I get time to clean it up. The manual suggests getting some cork to rest it on to reduce the sound (it is a solid item).
At a technical conference a few years back, I decided to give my presentation using hand written viewfoils on an overhead projector. The conference venue had to really dig to find a working projector :-)
For years afterwards, people would come up to me and remark on how that presentation stuck in their memory!
(I still have a mechanical typewriter. Maybe I won't throw it away after all.)
A friend of mine fell when going on stage for a conference. He broke his nose and there were lots of blood and an ambulance involved. Everybody remembers it.
It's great that you use that technique if it is going to make your presentation clearer, if using the projector really helped your audience to get whatever you were presenting better. If that was the case, congratulations for an original idea. But if they only remember you as the annoying guy who had everybody waiting while looking for a projector, I would not feel very proud of it.
I had the sense to talk to the conference people a couple weeks in advance about the projector, and it was waiting in the conference room on schedule. So that wasn't a problem.
It didn't affect the content of the presentation at all.
The only issue was one of perception - I was talking about new technology, and was presenting using old technology. It wasn't congruent, and didn't really fit, although it was fun. Hence it was a one-off thing. I didn't do it again.
I doubt today one could even find a viewfoil projector, and the audio-visual staff would be annoyed because it won't interface to their recording system. Annoying the AV staff is never a good idea.
As a typewriter collector and huge nerd this is great. If you want to learn more about the recent revolution in typewriter ownership, etc. check out Richard Polt's book: The Typewriter Revolution. Really nicely done. I keep a 1958 Hermes Rocket in my office and it bemuses the younger staff, and visitors, most of whom have never seen one up close.
I recently wrote something on a typewriter, got half way though the page and spelt a word incorrectly, tried to fix it and somehow destroyed the whole page...
My international politics professor had a story about how he had a copy of his master's thesis in his carry-on on a train in what was then Soviet Russia. He left the bag on the train and ended up having to retype the whole thing in a weekend.
