{"id":15,"date":"2011-10-08T03:36:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-08T03:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/structuredprocrastination.com\/blog\/?p=15"},"modified":"2022-04-18T22:27:31","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T22:27:31","slug":"a-short-history-of-typing-a-tribute-to-steve-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/structuredprocrastination.com\/blog\/?p=15","title":{"rendered":"A Short History of Typing: A Tribute to Steve Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: left;\"><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"pub-4717528024366933\";\r\ngoogle_alternate_color = \"FFFFFF\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 180;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 150;\r\ngoogle_ad_format = \"180x150_as\";\r\ngoogle_ad_type = \"text_image\";\r\ngoogle_ad_channel =\"\";\r\ngoogle_color_border = \"\";\r\ngoogle_color_link = \"\";\r\ngoogle_color_bg = \"\";\r\ngoogle_color_text = \"\";\r\ngoogle_color_url = \"\";\r\n\/\/--><\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\n  src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script><\/div><p>by John Perry<\/p>\n<p>October 7, 2011<\/p>\n<p>Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace.\u00a0 I write this on a MacBook Pro, using the Apples Pages program (inexpensive compared to Word), while listening to music I bought from the ITunes, played through my MacBook.\u00a0 The speakers the music comes out of, and the pipe I am smoking, and the clothes I am wearing, are virtually the only parts of my present existence that don\u2019t owe something to Jobs.\u00a0 Quite a guy.\u00a0 This has led to think about what writing used to be like.<\/p>\n<p>By the time Jobs was born, in 1955, I was already twelve and doing a lot of typing.\u00a0 My parents had an old L.C. Smith machine in the basement which my brother and I both used.\u00a0 He wrote science fiction, a life-long passion.\u00a0 I wrote history, mainly summaries of what I read in Hillyer\u2019s <em>A Child\u2019s History of the World<\/em>, H.G. Wells\u2019 <em>Outlines of Histor<\/em>y, and Van Loon\u2019s <em>Story of Mankind<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The main enjoyment came from using the big machine, still a shiny black after years of use.\u00a0 You hit the keys and then they made a very satisfying \u201cwhap\u201d on the paper, a nice comforting noise of accomplishment.\u00a0 At the end of the line you threw the carriage return, on the right side of the L.C. Smith machines, unlike most others.\u00a0 This break in typing, it turns out, was a main reason generations of manual typists didn\u2019t get carpal tunnel syndrome.\u00a0 At least I think I read that somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Typewriters were invented in the 1870\u2019s.\u00a0 The first generation of typewriters, until about the turn of the century, typed in the mechanically simplest way;\u00a0 you pressed the key down, which pressed one end of the typebar down.\u00a0 Like a teeter-totter, the other end of the typebar went up, hitting the paper and the platen on the bottom.\u00a0 You couldn\u2019t see what you had typed.\u00a0 You had to rotate the platen about a third of a turn to see, and then rotate it back to continue typing.<\/p>\n<p>A more complicated mechanism led to typebars that hit the front of the platen.\u00a0 These were called \u201cVisible Writers\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 The underwriters were doomed, although advertisements from their purveyors warned that seeing what you were typing was distracting, and could lead to confusion and dizziness.\u00a0 About this time a number of configurations were tried out.\u00a0 One of the most popular machines in offices near the turn of the century was the Oliver.\u00a0 The typebars were large U-shaped things, coming up in two batches, to the left and the right of the platen.\u00a0 When you typed, they whapped down from above, putting gravity on your side.\u00a0 The Oliver remained a best-seller for ten or fifteen years, until the company decided to market them directly through the mail, rather than through stores.\u00a0 That didn\u2019t work and the Oliver faded into history.<\/p>\n<p>Also at that time something akin to the later IBM Selectric, with its print-ball, was developed.\u00a0 The type was all on a cylinder; when you typed the cylinder was turned and raised and lowered just the right amount for the required letter to hit the platen.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone has heard about the QWERTY keyboard.\u00a0 The configuration of keys we have now was developed early, to keep people from typing too fast, and to make it probable that successive key strokes were from different sides of the keyboard.\u00a0 This helped prevent jams.\u00a0 The fact that we still use QWERTY keyboards is a tribute to the principle that non-optimal arrangements survive, when the reason for adopting them is long past, if change requires new habits.<\/p>\n<p>A number of turn-of-the century typewriters had two QUERTY keyboards, one for regular letters and one for capitals: a difficult system for for touch typists, one supposes.\u00a0 The standard configuration of three rows of letters and a top row of numbers took a while to become universal.\u00a0 Many typewriters had just three rows, with two shift keys, one which gave you capitals, the other which gave you numbers and other odds and ends.\u00a0 One of the most popular of these was the first portable, a Corona whose keyboard folded elegantly onto the platen, so the whole thing could be fitted into a small case.\u00a0 You can still find these at flea-markets and antique stores; I paid $10 for one a few years ago, but now they are closer to $100.<\/p>\n<p>Once the standard configuration was settled on, and the underwriters and the Olivers bit the dust,\u00a0 typewriters were all pretty similar and didn\u2019t change much for about fifty years.\u00a0\u00a0 There were Underwoods, the biggest sellers, Royals, the handsomest, L.C. Smiths,\u00a0 Corona portables, and then Smith-Coronas when those companies merged.\u00a0 Less popular were the Woodstocks, but they became famous when Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee convicted Alger Hiss on testimony from Whittaker Chambers; a Woodstock was a key bit of evidence.\u00a0 I think it was found hidden in a pumpkin in Chambers\u2019 garden, although maybe it was something else that was hidden in the pumpkin.\u00a0 A pumpkin would have to be pretty big to hide a Woodstock.<\/p>\n<p>Virtually all typewriters were black enamel until the forties,, and then\u00a0 sort of slightly textured grey or brown finishes became popular.\u00a0 The typewriters used in my typing class in high-school were like that; brown Royals I think; the keys were blank to force you to memorize the letters so you could look at the paper instead of at your hands.\u00a0 There were also lots of portables; no longer foldups, just smaller versions of the big machines.\u00a0 Writers like Hemmingway used them, carrying them with their luggage on trains and ships to Paris and Havana and other exotic places.<\/p>\n<p>Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties IBM developed electric typewriters, and these eventually became standard in offices.\u00a0 My father had a small law firm in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his brother and their father.\u00a0 I remember going there in the mid-fifties, and they were still using manuals.\u00a0 The secretary, Mildred, could type sixty or seventy words a minute flawlessly, with five or six carbons.\u00a0 The contracts and briefs they typed at a law office weren\u2019t supposed to have any mistakes.\u00a0 It was quite amazing to watch her type, and the whole operation was very noisy in a pleasant way.<\/p>\n<p>Carbons?\u00a0 Do young people know what carbon paper and carbon copies were all about?\u00a0 I wonder.<\/p>\n<p>For graduation from Lincoln Southeast High in 1960 I got a pale green Smith-Corona portable; until then I had used the L.C. Smith in the basement when I needed to type an essay.\u00a0 I used this portable though my undergraduate years at Doane College, and for most of graduate school at Cornell.\u00a0 It never let me down; never crashed; never interrupted me in the middle of an essay to tell me I needed to update software; never became obsolete because software didn\u2019t work on its operating system, never had any mechanical problems at all. In this brave new world, we now also have so many staff working remotely so it can be very wise to invest in some quality <a href=\"https:\/\/www.workpuls.com\/employee-monitoring\">remote employee monitoring software<\/a> as that makes managing those staff so much easier.\u00a0 As an undergraduate I typed all of my assignments, and many of my wife\u2019s, on this great little machine.<\/p>\n<p>At Cornell of course I had to write a dissertation, which I did on this portable.\u00a0 Typing an essay or a dissertation was a lot of work.\u00a0 You typed a draft of an essay or a chapter.\u00a0 Then, to revise, you had to type it again from scratch.\u00a0 I would lay out the pages on a couch and table, and then cut them into pieces and scotch-tape them together in the revised order that seemed appropriate.\u00a0 Additions were hand-written or typed, and taped in place.\u00a0 Then you put this mess on the desk &#8212; usually about 3 a.m. the day before the essay was due &#8212; and typed it all again &#8212; with a carbon, if you wanted a copy for yourself.\u00a0 But you didn\u2019t just type the draft verbatim.\u00a0 Since you had to type each sentence, you thought about each sentence, and the thing improved with each draft.<\/p>\n<p>While I was in graduate school, Smith-Corona came out with an electric version of their portable.\u00a0 At that time Frenchie, my wife, and Jim and Sarah, my two oldest, all lived on a meager (but much appreciated) fellowship from the Danforth Foundation.\u00a0 Nevertheless, I came up with the $100 or so required to buy one of these machines.\u00a0 It was fantastic.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t as problem free as the manual portable.\u00a0 Twice as I was typing furiously the end of the `e\u2019 typebar flew off, and had to be soldered back on (or maybe the whole typebar was replaced, I\u2019m not sure).\u00a0 I typed the last version of my dissertation &#8212; that is, the version that my committee had for my oral &#8212; on that machine, making four or five carbons, which would have been impossible on the manual.\u00a0\u00a0 Then the whole thing had to be retyped by a professional for the university\u2019s archives; I was never a good enough typist to produce the error-free pages that were required for that.<\/p>\n<p>Typewriters were an important part of my life at UCLA (1968&#8211;1974), used to write the articles that earned tenure (or at any rate sufficed for me to get it), as well as lectures, memos, and lots of anti-war materials, and a beautiful pamphlet that Tom Hill and I wrote to protest the firing of our colleague, Angela Davis, by Governor Reagan and the UC Regents.\u00a0 Burt Lancaster actually gave us some money to distribute the pamphlet&#8212;but that\u2019s a different story.\u00a0 For serious stuff you could use the IBM self-correcting Selectrics in the Department Office.\u00a0 With them, it seemed to me that document preparation had reached perfection; nothing better could be imagined.<\/p>\n<p>Things changed when I moved to Stanford in 1974.\u00a0 My colleague Pat Suppes had an institute &#8212;the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, or IMSSS &#8212; which had a big computer, a DEC 10, I think.\u00a0 He had a lot of people working for him, and they were doing amazing stuff:\u00a0 developing computerized logic and set theory courses, among other things.\u00a0 In some dark corner of IMSSS Dikran Karagueuzian, now the esteemed leader of CSLI Publications, sat making Armenian computer-accessible.\u00a0 One fellow, a genius named Pennti Kanerva, developed a program called `TV Edit\u2019 &#8212; one of the best pieces of word processing software there ever was.\u00a0 Kanerva is now becoming famous as his work on Sparse Distributed Computing comes to the attention to brain-scientists, but people my age at Stanford still associate him with TV Edit, the first word-processing program many of us used.<\/p>\n<p>Suppes let philosophy graduate students and his faculty colleagues come over to IMSSS and use terminals running TV Edit., try the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eagletvmounting.com\/best-tv-wall-mount\">65 tv wall mount that is the best for you<\/a> and your home or business.\u00a0 Then you could print out your work on a huge printer, called a LinePrinter because it printed a whole line at a time.\u00a0 Talk about satisfying noises connected with writing!\u00a0 Kathunk, Kathunk, the whole building shook as your work was printed out.\u00a0 That was my introduction to Word Processing.<\/p>\n<p>There was a downside to this.\u00a0 Up until then, when a graduate student gave me a draft of a chapter or a whole dissertation, I would go over it with them and gently make suggestions and criticisms.\u00a0 I knew that to deal with them, the student would have to retype the whole thing,\u00a0 and I counted on that process to lead to much more radical rethinking and revision, so the next draft would be substantially changed.\u00a0 But the Stanford graduate students, using TV Edit, didn\u2019t have to do that.\u00a0 They could replace an offending paragraph, improve a disorganized section, change some terminology, just by cutting and pasting and searching and replacing on the computer.\u00a0 I could no longer count on mild criticisms from me, plus the discipline of retyping from scratch, to produce significantly changed drafts.\u00a0 For a while I tried forbidding my students from using TV Edit until their final draft, but that didn\u2019t fly for long.\u00a0 I learned that to get substantial revisions, I needed to make all my criticisms explicit and say several times:\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t just cut and paste.\u00a0 Rethink and revise!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>My grandfather used to complain that the typewriter had ruined English literature, leading from the sort of florid prose that flowed from the pens of Dickens or Henry James to the telegraphic style of Hemmingway.\u00a0 I thought that was a sort of curmudgeonly point of view, but perhaps something like it is true in analytical philosophy, where short polished articles have given way to self-indulgent books, no doubt due in large part to how much easier it\u2019s become to write such things.<\/p>\n<p>Then Jobs and Wozniak invented the PC, and IBM and Radio Shack came out with their versions.\u00a0 Stanford helped those of us in the Humanities to buy machines, and everything changed.\u00a0 There wasn\u2019t much more to the internet than file-transfer and email, which most people didn\u2019t yet use.\u00a0 To do those things you needed a modem, usually 300 or 1200 baud.\u00a0 There were no hard disks, and you could only run one program at a time, and you had to load it from a floppy disc.\u00a0 Looking back it\u2019s hard to see why such machines were the godsend that they were.\u00a0 But in a way things were easier; once your got your word-processing program working and started to write, there was no motivation to stop and surf the net, which didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n<p>Jobs\u2019 Macintosh brought WYZIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processing, icons, the mouse, and other things to the world of PC users.\u00a0 The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and the rest by folks over at Xerox Parc, but it took Jobs to put it all together.\u00a0 After his exile from Apple, he returned with his solid NEXT operating system, based on UNIX.\u00a0 Since then its been one thing after another.\u00a0 My MacBook Pro is based on a solid system, not the elaborations on kludges that the original PCs ran (and some still do).\u00a0 There is every conceivable temptation to waste time; you can watch movies, do email, surf the web, catch up on the news, and a hundred other things rather than write the essay you sat down to write.\u00a0 Or you can just write something other than what you intended to work on, which I have just done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by John Perry October 7, 2011 Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace.\u00a0 I write this on a MacBook Pro, using the Apples Pages program (inexpensive compared to Word), while listening to music I bought from the ITunes, played through &hellip; 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