Typewriters... (re)live the experience!

Column / Writing.

Do you remember good ol' typewriters? Man, the horror! 😣😂

I don't think there's anyone who has good memories about typewriters. I'm certainly not one of them.

Hema / Olivetti

When I was young (and not yet spoiled by wordprocessors) I owned an Olivetti typewriter. I think it was the Lettera 44k, resold by Hema under their own name, but I'm not entirely sure anymore. It had a horrible clam-shell cover, designed in such a way you'd drop the machine at the most inconvenient of moments. (These images aren't mine, I found them on the Internet. Also, my machine was a horrid light-blue, but I remember they came in other colors such as boring gray and girly pink.)

Good Memories

No way!

Imagine you have no backspace to fix your typos? That you can't insert words afterwards? That the arms of your typewriter might interfere with one another, getting stuck? That you have to press every key with roughly the same pressure so the letters have about the same 'blackness'? That you can't copy / paste / reorganize your words, paragraphs, chapters? Or do a search / replace on a character's name?

It was horrible!

How did writers write 35 years ago?!?

(Re)live the experience!

If you want to know how it feels to write something on an old typewriter, why not try this page:

• https://uniqcode.com/typewriter/

Hint!

Start typing at the default settings, then every time 'ribbon' goes below 200 move it to 600 and decrease 'brokenness' with one, to keep your frustration under control.

The result would look something like this (click to enlarge)...

(To be honest, the original looks a little better. Apparently, saving as a PDF doesn't properly remove the 'removed / corrected' parts of the original. But it gives you an idea...)