Mother enrolled us in typing classes one summer at the Set Center. This was way back in the days when manual typewriters were still being used for school and computers were found in offices and not in every other room in one's home.
At that time, making several copies meant using carbon paper thus the origination of the terms cc: [carbon copy] and bcc: [blind carbon copy]. Almost everything one typed was in black since the most common typewriter ribbon was black. If you wanted your original copy to have two colors, you had to look for the two-colored black-and-white ribbon and that was it. There was no palette of colors available, just black or red.
Cut and paste literally meant cut and paste, and this required scissors and glue. Corrections often involved starting over because there was no such thing as UNDO although there was correction tape and correction fluid available to help you along.
Yes, it was a time when 'check spelling' involved reading each and every word instead of clicking on these words (CHECK SPELLING) and waiting for erroneously spelled words to be underlined or highlighted. If you needed to confirm the correct spelling of a word, you had to get a dictionary from the bookshelf.
There were calculation involved in getting words centered on a page. One had to get the difference between the number of characters the paper could contain and the number of characters one needed to center, divide this by two then place these number of spaces before typing.
Many of the manual activities were automated by the electric typewriter. Some electric typewriters allowed you to type the words in, hit a back space key and make corrections. The RETURN or ENTER key was the equivalent of the manual typewriter's CARRIAGE RETURN and was used when you were ready to see the words typed out on your paper. The more advanced electric typewriters did the centering and even justification. One of the innovations of the electric typewriter involved the change from the typebars with individual letters to the typeball, then much later to the daisy wheel mechanism. Seriously, the typeball was no fun at all because as a child, pretending to type at lightspeed per minute and getting the typebars all tangled up was half the fun of playing with a manual typewriter. It was even a challenge of how many keys one could get all stuck up in one go. The daisy wheel, on the other hand, was a welcome change that provided alternatives in terms of fonts and sizes. Well, no manual typewriter could give you that. And you know how there are days when you just want your paper to look a tad different.
Today, in this age of computers, changing fonts and sizes are as easy as blinking. Even electric typewriters have found their way to the dark side of the closets, the deep corners of storage areas, or worse, the recycling bin or the trash pile. Surely computers have made life simpler for many people. But I do believe that learning how to touch type is still a good skill to have.
It is interesting to see how manufacturers are able alter the shape and size of the keyboard to match the size of their product. I sometimes feel like Goldilocks when I see the keyboards around this house.
This one is too small ....
(Father gave this one to MyGirl before we left. She loves it. I find the keyboard too tiny!)
This one is too BIG ...
(This keyboard belongs to my godson. He's in Kindergarten. He lent us his workstation for a while so we have a desktop to use. Isn't he the sweetest thing? When I used this keyboard one morning, I felt Jack in the Beanstalk using the Giant's PC.)
Ahhh ... this one is just right ...
(This belongs to GI. Check out his set-up. It has to be comfortable because he spends a heck of a lot of time here.)
GI, where is the N? Oh, there it is.
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