Clickity-Clickity Typewriters!

The Magic of Correcting Typewriters

So, full disclosure — typewriters predate me, but only mostly. My dad purchased our first home computer in 1980, when I was six-years-old, and that’s what learned to type on. I grew up having a backspace key available to me, a magical button that allowed typists to back up and fix any mistyped characters.

In high school, ninth or tenth grade I think, I had to take a nine-week typing class. The class used old school typewriters. We’re talking the old school ones, with keys that would get jammed. Mistakes were corrected wit the use of liquid paper white out. This was at a time that I had used a TRS-80 Model III computer for a couple of years, an Apple II computer for two or three years, and a Commodore 64 for three or four years. Moving to a machine that looked like a computer without a backspace key, a monitor, or a hard drive felt like trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

At some time in the mid-80s, my mom got a Smith Corona typewriter with an amazing new feature — a corrective tape feature! This was a step up from what we had at school, being an electric typewriter. Any time the user pressed a wrong key, the ribbon (which was stored as a cartridge) could be removed and swapped out with a corrective one. Then, the user would back up to where the typo was and press the same key. The corrective tape would literally suck the ink right back off the paper!

I couldn’t remember why we would have purchased a typewriter in a home with multiple computers, but now that I think about it we probably owned dot-matrix printers at the time. For important things like resumes, people still preferred documents created on typewriters.

I recently took the above picture at a garage sale, and it’s the exact same model my family owned so it must have been a popular model. Typewriters are a tough sell when it comes to collecting. Once the novelty passes, and it will pass quickly. you’re left with something that doesn’t do anything a modern laser printer can’t do more quickly and efficiently. While I enjoy looking at old typewriters, I’ve drawn a hard line in the sand when it comes to buying them.