You've come a long way typist

I can't help thinking how far the word processing has come as I sit here with my laptop on - well my lap. I learnt how to type on a manual typewriter eons ago at Secretarial college. These machines were murder on the hands and for what seemed like months, my wrists were in constant pain. The typewriter pictured is almost like the one which I learnt how to type. Apart from the sheer muscle power needed to use these machines, there were some issues that came with these typewriters.

The typist had to listen out for a bell which warned her when she got close to the edge of the right margin, so that she could turn the carriage return lever, on the left of the typewriter to begin a new line on the paper. A lot of the old typewriters didn't have a separate key for the numbers one (1) or zero(0) so we improvised, using the lowercase letter l for the letter 1, and the uppercase O for the zero.

Oh the fun that was in changing the ribbon!!!!(made up of inked cotton strips which you used until they faded) and in correcting typos. If you threaded the ribbon the wrong way, you spent the whole day with inky fingers and tears of frustration, a ruined ribbon and a whole pile of black papers. Most typewriter ribbons were black; black and red ribbons were for used for special letters. The typewriter eraser made of a hard rubber, which had an abrasive material, and a stiff brush to brush away eraser crumbs. We had to be careful because if erasure debris fell into the typewriter, a build-up could cause the type bars to jam. The hell that was correcting carbon copies was a whole science in itself, and we to use something known as an eraser shield to stop the pressure of erasing on the upper copies from making carbon smudges on the lower copies.

When Liquid Paper, Wite-Out and Tipp-Ex arrived on the scene, it was like a miracle - these were sort of opaque white fast-drying paint which somehow produced a fresh white surface over the error. No more erasers, no more brushes. I could not find a single picture of a typewriter eraser anywhere. No big loss.

Of course these typewriters did not have different fonts, graphics or bold and italics. Words that needed highlighting were underlined. Even now, I cannot bring myself to use Times or neither Courier fonts, I do not underline anything. Reminds me too much of manual typewriters.

Electronic Typewriter (first seen in the early 1980s) changed the face of typing completely. The height of which was the IBM Correcting Selectric. The Selectric, and similar products, incorporated a black/white ribbon and a character memory. It suddenly became easy to make corrections (on the letterhead) with a single keystroke. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Most typists equate the invention of type balls or golf balls to cooking with gas. They replaced the type bars and eliminated “jams" when more than one key was struck at once, which happened when you typed too fast for the old manual and eventually when we were able to change the golf balls, multiple fonts could be be used in a single document.

The old ribbons were later replaced with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or coloured powder on a "once-through" clear plastic tape. These could be used only once but later models used a cartridge that was simple to replace. Unfortunately, the text typed could be easily read from the used ribbon, thus making them unsuitable for typing classified documents. A document reconstructed from a used carbon ribbon was portrayed as the key to solving a crime in an episode of Colombo.

Oh yes, you have come a long way typist. I happily consign manual typewriters to museums and wholeheartedly embrace computers with all the benefits of fonts, spellcheck and graphics.