I Miss Typewriters, Sort Of
I think about typewriters more than I want to use one. That is probably the honest version. The romance of the thing, Hemingway in Key West, the ding of the carriage return, the keys striking paper like small hammers, all of it falls apart the second I imagine actually sitting down at one. I have dyslexia. A typewriter does not forgive dyslexia. Once those keys hit the paper, that was it. You lived with the mistake, painted over it with white-out, or fed a new sheet through the roller and started again. The backspace key changed my life. So did Control Z. So did spellcheck, and cutting and pasting thoughts around the page like moving furniture in a room.
I took typing in middle school. By high school they had renamed it keyboarding, which tells you how fast things were moving. We had word processors then, strange hybrid machines, part typewriter, part computer, gone almost as soon as they arrived. Then Apple started showing up in schools and libraries, and that was the end of the word processor as a category.
Our town library got its first Apple and you had to take a little class to use it. When you passed, the librarian put a sticker with an apple on your library card. That sticker felt like joining the future. Toddlers swipe screens now before they can read. Back then, touching a computer felt like walking into NASA.
My wife and I bought our first PC through a program at her work. A Gateway, back when they shipped in cow-spotted boxes. The company is gone now, another one swallowed by time. We paid for it with pretax payroll deductions, which at the time felt like a serious financial strategy. It came with an encyclopedia on CD-ROM and software packages we barely understood. The internet came on discs. Try explaining that sentence to a teenager.
And then there was Clippy. That smiling little menace who popped onto your screen uninvited like an overeager substitute teacher. “It looks like you’re writing a letter.” No kidding, Clippy, what gave it away, the words on the screen? He would bounce around tapping the glass like he was trying to keep you awake during a boring meeting. I do not think I ever met a single person who liked him. Yet there he was, always watching, always interrupting. You would be trying to figure out why your printer was not working, or why your paper had suddenly changed fonts, and Clippy would appear with the confidence of a man who had absolutely no idea what was going on. Looking back, maybe he was just ahead of his time. He was the first AI assistant. Only instead of unlocking the future of humanity, he mostly annoyed people trying to finish homework and balance their checkbooks.
You could not use the internet and the phone at the same time. If somebody called while you were online and you had call-waiting, it kicked you right off. There was nothing quite like hearing that beep in the middle of a download that had already taken twenty minutes.
My wife was in her master’s program then. She would write a paper, save it to a floppy disk, and hand the disk directly to her professor. Today, if one of my students handed me a random drive and asked me to plug it into the system, campus IT would tackle me to the ground before the connector cleared the port.
My iPhone has more memory and computing power than that first Gateway, the one that felt enormous in our tiny apartment. Back then our major appliances were the television, the refrigerator, the microwave, and the computer. The stove came with the apartment, so it did not count.
I miss those days sometimes, not because they were easier. They were not. Every new piece of technology felt rare, and rare things get appreciated. You sat down at the family computer with purpose. Now my daughter carries around an iPad with more power than the systems that put astronauts on the moon, and she uses it mostly to watch other people open boxes.
Every generation thinks the world changed the fastest during theirs. They are probably all right. But somewhere between the clack of typewriter keys and the silent tapping of glass, we traded a little of the romance for speed and convenience and the ability to reach anyone, anytime, for any reason. That is probably a fair trade.
Still, every now and then a typewriter shows up in a movie, and I hear that sound, and I think, that sounded like work. Now I have to get back to work “typing” on my keyboard writing things for my day job.