In one of those funny moments where multiple hobbies of mine (in this case typewriters and old computers) cross paths I thought it would be fun to take a look back to a February 1st 1980 internal Apple Computer memo regarding the banning of typewriters (and any similar devices) from the company by January 1st, 1981.
Keep in mind, this was the time before the Macintosh – we’re talking still Apple ][ and, soon to come, the somewhat disastrous Apple III and LISA era’s. Word processing was growing in usage as computers were adopted in many companies and was about to become a very big thing once the Graphic User Interface became mainstream and the desktop publishing revolution happens in the mid 80’s and early 90’s.
Let’s take a step back for a moment, though, back to 1980. As this memo implies, the faithful typewriter was still very much in use at Apple at this time — a somewhat incredible thought today, that in such a “cutting edge” company that something that had been around a century before would even be used at all but we have to remember, this was only 3 years after the “1977 computer trinity” of the Apple ][, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80 and their accompanying printers.
Indeed, a computer, if used for document creation, is only as good as the printing technology attached to it, and in these early days, between screens not being able to show a full page of text and dot matrix printers being dominant, the very idea of drafting a document and actually having it look decent when printed was an expensive proposition. Sure, daisy-wheel printers were an option, providing typewriter like print quality, but still — for document creation in and of itself, typewriters were just the way to go.
Things would quickly change, and Apple, being the company that it was then and (debatably) is now wanted to move forward by pushing the old, familiar, but obsolete typewriter out and making word processing which, as the memo notes is “so neat” the new standard within the company.
I find it somewhat hilarious that in this memo one staff member is mentioned by name as having a DEC word processor — not even that piece of hardware would be spared. If it wasn’t an Apple computer running a true word processor, it was out the door.
Of course they would give an incentive to anyone who did ditch their typewriter would get, as best I can tell from the terseness of the Memo, Qume brand daisy-wheel printing systems. At least they gave you something for ditching the old faithful.
Of course 40 years later we all look at this and have a laugh. Computers these days last you 5 to 8 years at most before their age catches up with them — if not sooner. Your phone barely lasts 2 years if you’re lucky, and everything is, in effect, obsolete the moment it ships.
For contrast, those of us in the typosphere still use typewriters regularly (hell, my day job, at a used video game store no less, has some special documents being made that require me to use my typewriters to “fill in the blanks” in an elegant way.) We adore these machines for how they keep us in contact with the history of writing following the industrial revolution. They are an experience not quite like anything else; especially a true manual machine that may well be older than your grandparents, but still works as good as the day it left the factory.
I just found it really neat to muse upon, especially since the 1st was the 40th anniversary of the release of the now somewhat legendary memo.
For more perspective and details that may be of interest, check out this link.
More to come, as always.