For more than a dozen years, after I began writing professionally, I shared a dental ritual every six months with my 1957 Royal Model FP manual typewriter. After the hygienist finished her version of waterboarding and handed me a new toothbrush, I gave the old one to my Royal. I had a small red brush that was actually made to clean ink from the keys, but the longer toothbrush-handles gave me better purchase to get the job done. I could do no less. During all those years, that durable instrument, with its impervious metallic gray casing and red-and-gold Royal crest, remained unfailingly steadfast.
It never told me I was out of memory.
It never crashed.
It never required diskettes, zip drives, tapes, flash drives or extra keystrokes to “backup“ data.
It never called my prose data.
It never caused a single page to turn black and disappear forever.
It never freaked out during an electrical storm.
It never required professional repair, an instruction book, or an inadvertent call to India for panic-stricken venting.
Above all, it never aged. At no point in our relationship did the issue of replacement arise. I may have cheated on a girlfriend, but never on my 1957 Royal. The offer of a free IBM Selectric III, with its incessant hum, alleged memory, and hypersensitive keys (you couldn’t thoughtfully drum on them), didn’t tempt me.
But then the world went computer, and like most people I became a word processor. After doing obsessive research, testing dozens of keyboards in search of one that approximated the feel to which I was accustomed, I confidently purchased the worst piece of mechanical hoo-ha I’ve ever owned. (Nice keyboard, though.) Manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, the DEC Rainbow cost more than anything I had bought to that date, including a new Pontiac. It used large, papery, floppy discs that would not interact with any non-DEC computer. I wanted to love the Rainbow. I did love the women (they were always women) who provided DEC’s phone support in Atlanta. They called me “hon.“ Even the one I spoke to on a Sunday evening as I nearly completed an essay on Charlie Parker commissioned by the great critic Martin Williams for an anthology he was editing at the Smithsonian, due the next morning…
Typewriter
Typewriter
By Gary Giddins
For more than a dozen years, after I began writing professionally, I shared a dental ritual every six months with my 1957 Royal Model FP manual typewriter. After the hygienist finished her version of waterboarding and handed me a new toothbrush, I gave the old one to my Royal. I had a small red brush that was actually made to clean ink from the keys, but the longer toothbrush-handles gave me better purchase to get the job done. I could do no less. During all those years, that durable instrument, with its impervious metallic gray casing and red-and-gold Royal crest, remained unfailingly steadfast.
It never told me I was out of memory.
It never crashed.
It never required diskettes, zip drives, tapes, flash drives or extra keystrokes to “backup“ data.
It never called my prose data.
It never caused a single page to turn black and disappear forever.
It never freaked out during an electrical storm.
It never required professional repair, an instruction book, or an inadvertent call to India for panic-stricken venting.
Above all, it never aged. At no point in our relationship did the issue of replacement arise. I may have cheated on a girlfriend, but never on my 1957 Royal. The offer of a free IBM Selectric III, with its incessant hum, alleged memory, and hypersensitive keys (you couldn’t thoughtfully drum on them), didn’t tempt me.
But then the world went computer, and like most people I became a word processor. After doing obsessive research, testing dozens of keyboards in search of one that approximated the feel to which I was accustomed, I confidently purchased the worst piece of mechanical hoo-ha I’ve ever owned. (Nice keyboard, though.) Manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, the DEC Rainbow cost more than anything I had bought to that date, including a new Pontiac. It used large, papery, floppy discs that would not interact with any non-DEC computer. I wanted to love the Rainbow. I did love the women (they were always women) who provided DEC’s phone support in Atlanta. They called me “hon.“ Even the one I spoke to on a Sunday evening as I nearly completed an essay on Charlie Parker commissioned by the great critic Martin Williams for an anthology he was editing at the Smithsonian, due the next morning…