W/NW Show Us Your Manual Typewriters

Great idea for a thread!

I no longer have such a machine, but I learned to type on a manual standard and I preferred manual typewriters to electrics for a long time.

- Murray
 
Robert Lai said:
A while ago, I read that the Russian FSO was purchasing Triumph Adler manual typewriters for their most secure communications.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...s-to-typewriters-to-avoid-computer-leaks.html

The most secure communication in this day and age is on paper, sent by courier. The President even said this himself.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...-to-cyberattacks-write-it-down-and-send-it-by
Click to expand...


Yep. There's nothing more secure than paper and a dead drop.
 
Not mine (the typewriters, I mean), but seemed appropriate:

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Peter,
Is that a CRT oscilloscope behind that green IBM Selectric?
So cool!

When I just got into high school, I volunteered at the local hospital (Scarborough General, in Ontario, Canada) for their fund drive.
We volunteers typed out fund raising letters asking for donations. They were typed out on fancy new IBM Selectrics!
That was the first time I'd every seen an electric typewriter.
So big and "important" looking.
It even had an erase key to clean up my amateur typing. The selectric could remember a few keystrokes at a time, so there wasn't the typical "clash of keys" that happened with a manual typewriter if you tried to go too fast.

I was really impressed with the secretaries. They were true professionals who could take shorthand. HEARING them type was an amazing feat: a steady fusillade of sound, then the paper is out of the machine.

Then we signed our letters, and placed them in stamped envelopes.

People responded warmly to these letters, as they knew another person had spent time and effort typing and signing these. The human touch. Now we have mail merge and scanned signatures. People throw these letters into the trash.
 
CMur12 said:
I no longer have such a machine, but I learned to type on a manual standard and I preferred manual typewriters to electrics for a long time.
Click to expand...

I had one until just before the first of the year (electric, not manual however, Smith Corona) and donated it to Goodwill mainly because I never used it.

I learned to type on my mom's Remington portable, kinda like the one shown here, but I always preferred an electric.

As an aside, in many schools they don't teach "Typing" anymore, they teach "Keyboarding", to use the buzzword-compliant term du jour. :)
 
Hey! I'll play - I've got an Underwood S from 1949 or something. After I got a typewriter I made an effort to learn how to type properly, haha. Here with some other vintage keys in the background. (Olympus Pen EE-3)






Not a typewriter, but another office machine - Facit TK calculator. Probably the coolest thing I've ever bought for $40.

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DSCF5033a by Joe Van Cleave, on Flickr

Corona Standard, circa late-1930s. I acquired this from a UNM biochemist whose father used it in college in the late1940s; then he used it in the late 1970s; the last it'd seen use was 1980; it sat in a closet for 36 years, until I acquired it.
 
Olivetti Underwood 21 by Joe Van Cleave, on Flickr

Olivetti-Underwood 21; same chassis as Olivetti Studio 44. I purchased this from a now defunct thrift store for $20. The shop owner told me the story that the original owner rode out to New Mexico in the 1960s on a motorcycle to become a writer, and traded his bike for this typewriter. When I got home, I found the original receipt in the case, dated February 29, 1968 (leap year), that indicated a trade between a car dealership and office supply store. I don't know who the writer was.
 
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