From The Long Now blog, an entry today about the end of typewriter manufacturing. What will it be next? VCRs? Film cameras?
I never got much use out of the typewriter as a writing machine. I used them to fill out forms in that dimly lit pre-PDF-dawn when fax machines were hot. I used typewriter impersonators (compact dot matrix word processors, essentially), although I can’t think of a single document whose production depended on it such that it couldn’t by then have been more sleekly crafted on a computer. I read Click, Clack, Moo to Is. twenty or thirty times when she was younger, so that’s something. But this isn’t the sort of discontinuation that I would think gives anyone much pause, except perhaps to wonder which commonplace technologies of today will surrender to obsolescence in the next 25 years.
I suspect this is generational, at least somewhat. I had a typewriter at the beginning of college I used quite a bit, the budding short story writer that I was. But by the time I was a college junior, I was all computer.
BTW, some nice links in that piece….
Generational is probably right. I never bought a typewriter. They were a part of the world before me, both at home and at work.
Yes, nice links, I agree. I like the idea of loft apartments in an old typewriter factory. Oh, wait…you’re not getting a USB typewriter for the iPad, are you?