Back in my college days my school had rooms full of things called typewriters so the students could type up their papers and become well acquainted with the smell of white out. I was very happy one day to find a typewriter at a garage sale for $10. So now I actually had one in my dorm room, it weighed a ton, but it was all mine. At the beginning of the semester the ribbon would be new and the words were clear, by the end, after being typed over 500 times, the words were light and not so clear. But it was better than writing out the paper by hand and the teachers could read it because my hand writing sucks. Actually had a professor complain once about the font on my typewriter, like I could change it.

I met my spouse in college, not because I owned a typewriter, that didn’t make you more attractive. The reason I bring this up is because they were often late in handing in papers. On one particular instance they had 2 hours to get the paper under the professor’s door or get a F. They had typed it before, but it had a lot of revisions and needed to be re typed. So they took all the odd pages and I took all the even and set to re type it on different typewriters. So the even pages had one font and the odd had another, thou I don’t think we referred to it as fonts, but rather type face. Unfortunately I don’t recall the grade they got or if they lost points for the different fonts, but it got turned in with minutes to spare and we’ve been working as a team ever since!

Near the end of my college career PC’s started to appear. The school I was at invested in McIntosh’s. My introduction to computers was by finding a floppy disk in my travels and going to the computer room and putting it in to see what was on it. Turns out; there was a word processing program and I was hooked and my typewriter became a huge paper weight. What a concept, being able to correct mistakes and not getting a buzz from the white out! Then having the ability to do a rewrite; without having to re type the entire page and just saving it to the disk and printing it out when I felt like it. Next I was able to obtain a truly revolutionary upgrade, spell check! Where had this been for two thirds of my college career!

Recently I watched the Steve Jobs movie and found out that McIntosh’s were considered a failure, I loved mine, though it was years before I could afford another Apple product after it died. I won’t even discuss how hard drives changed my life and saved my back.