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And the computer tempts conspicuous consumption. The human eye wasn't meant to read on a screen. It breeds laziness: I can't produce a manuscript now without typos, even with spellcheck, grammarcheck, multiple readings. Writing on the computer is so easy, almost no physical effort required, I can easily do 120 wpm when I barely have to touch the keys. I realized I hadn't written much of anything worthwhile in a long time, and I was beginning to suspect the computer had something to do with it. I was cruising eBay one day and stumbled on some typewriter listings. But I'm pragmatic as well, and a collector. I remember the world being a better, easier place before computers came along, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn the world was more pleasant before Ford got his assembly line going. Easy to use? You bet! But there's always another program required, another machine to invest in, more upgrades, printers, toner cartridges, floppy discs, CD-ROMs, memory keys.

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Why won't this print right? What stray code is fouling things up? And the inevitable hard drive crash.īut a computer is a requirement for a writer. You could revise so easily! Print multiple copies without schlepping to the corner copy store! But every story took so long to create, not in the writing, but in all the fiddling, adjusting, tweaking required on the computer. The computer became my glory and my millstone. Casualties of the battles that left only Microsoft and Apple, Word and WordPerfect standing in the techno age.įinally I borrowed money and bought my first PC. Then came the CPT, a wonderful machine that I could literally make sing, with the proper coding. And who had room for one in a tiny New York apartment? The first word processor was the Vydec, an 800-pound monster steel desk with built-in impact printer and tall, skinny monitor with little rubber buttons alongside the green screen to format the text. Of course, dedicated word processors were now available, but I couldn't afford one. I found a little Brother that even had a memory of sorts-you could type a line of text, proof it on the tiny screen, then push a button and commit it to paper. I had proofed the pages in the carriage so I could correct any mistakes without shifting the paper.īut typing four drafts of a 400-page novel on that little plastic Swintec convinced me that I must have an electric typewriter. When the play received a staged reading, the director's wife commented to me, 'You know, your script has no typos. But it saw me through multiple drafts of my first novel and my first full-length play. I bought an expensive plastic Swintec portable. But it was now the 1980s, I decided I needed something state-of-the-art. The Royal saw me through many drafts of many stories and plays and poems, and I still run across old pages in my files with the recognizable elite typeface. I was more thrilled by that old typewriter than I would have been by a Porsche. My graduation present was not a car, not a trip to Europe, or even Mexico, but one of those big, clunky, blue Royals, reconditioned to a state of perfection. By the time I finished the semester I was doing 70-80 wpm on the big, clunky, blue Royals we used in class (with one row of electric typewriters that we rotated through so that we had one week's experience on a buzzing, rattling machine).

#MANUAL TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD HOW TO#

I took typing in high school, because, of course, I was a writer, and a writer must know how to type. Even with two fingers I was capable of sixty words a minute. So I learned to be sparing in my use of emphatics. They looked like periods with apostrophes. I was annoyed because they didn't look like real exclamation points, not like the ones in books. She was annoyed by my frequent use of the exclamation point-type the period, backspace, shift, type the apostrophe.

My parents didn't always understand me, but they had my number early.Ī few years later and I was writing real stories that required real typing, adult typing, so my mother typed them for me on a faintly remembered portable.

I may have been eight years old when I received for Christmas a toy typewriter, one of those tin affairs where you turned a wheel to the letter you wanted, then pushed down the entire one-piece keyboard to put ink to paper.

#MANUAL TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD MANUAL#

For any typewriter or manual related questions, please give us a call at 40 and a member of our team will be happy to assist you.Why I've Returned to the Manual TypewriterĪfter the pencil, the typewriter was my writing tool, as native to my hand as knife and fork.

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Use the table below to locate your typewriter model and download the associated manual.

Manual typewriter keyboard