Now, I really am feeling old! I realise that whole generations are 
living now who do /not/ know what a typewriter looks like nor how it 
worked. Incredible and sad but that is progress ;-)

My father was a journalist so the typewriter was the centrepiece of his 
work and I played/used it too from my most tender years. I knew all the 
bells and whistles, and all the smart tricks you could do with them. 
Later, at university, I typed my reports on my own typewriter. And then, 
during the early years at the Geological Survey, we wrote all the drafts 
of our reports and books in the same way. You know where the expression 
"cut-and-glue" comes from? Exactly! Writing books was writing (by hand) 
-> typing -> emending with pen and and ink -> cutting -> glueing -> 
typing again, and again, and again. We also had a nice lady who would 
help with the typing of course, whose typing errors we had then to 
correct again with pen and ink, and so on... ;-)

The coming of text editors on a central main frame computer you could 
reach by /dialling/ a phone number on your phone then changed the world 
for ever for us...

...but I suppose even that has been lost from memory and experience.

Thomas

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