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The Royal Quiet De Luxe portable typewriter is about a ten pound
machine capable of printing single page documents not wider than 9
inches and of indeterminate length. It was designed to allow the user
to continue working while on board trains and in hotel rooms, but was
never practical for air travel, due to its size and loud tapping
sounds.
Specifications
RAM: Zero MB, zero KB, just plain zero bytes, nothing, nada,
zippo
ROM: One font in ROM
Operating System: You
Hard Drive: 0.5 KB cylindrical platen that only recorded data
if you forgot to load paper
Floppy, tape, or other storage: none
Display: none other than printed output
Fonts: One monospaced 12 point serif font
Color output: Can be changed with special ribbons from black
to black and red or black and white (correction ribbon)
Power supply: none needed
Sound card: none, but outputs a sound set that consists of
"click," "chunk," and "ding," also a ratcheting noise as carriage
is returned to left position
Up to 10 user-adjustable tab settings
Line spacing: single or double spacing
Margin controls: Left and right adjustable, with margin
override (margin release) key
Spell check: none
Weight: about 10 pounds.
Twenty years ago, more or less, I was taught to type on a manual
typewriter in a hot, steamy room in a small school (no longer in
existence) in a small town in Kentucky. The fast students got to sit
at the end of the room and use one of four electric typewriters; at
35 wpm, I was one of the fast ones. However, at home I had to settle
for a small Royal portable, the kind you see in yard sales and flea
markets for $10 these days.
A few days ago I was forced to sit down at my portable Royal once
again to crank out some purchase orders in septuplicate (yeah, seven
copies) on short notice. The school has an electric typewriter it
keeps on hand for such purposes, but I had to have the forms done the
next day, so I pulled out the old portable and tried to remember how
to use it.
My current typewriter is not the same one I used back then; it's
actually an older model I picked up at a yard sale and is in
excellent condition.
Having used the old beast one more time, I was reminded about how
much things change and how much they stay the same.
Since my 14-year-old 9th grade students didn't recognize a movie
projector I had in the room the other day, it occurred to me that
many younger readers would not know what it was like to type on an
old manual typewriter (a cousin of mine once asked me how to turn it
on). So, from us old fogies to you young'uns, here's a little bit of
nostalgia.
Comparison to a Computer
It uses a QWERTY-style keyboard layout, although some of the keys
for symbols and characters are in different places. On my Mac
keyboard, for example, the asterisk is a shifted-8 keystroke, while
on my typewriter, the - (minus) and asterisk are on a separate key
after the zero key.
Keystrokes are very long, nearly half an inch or more of travel
before the key hits the platen (that's the roller the paper is on).
And to print well, you had to hit the key hard. If your finger
slipped, you could wind up with a traffic jam of keys all attempting
to print at one time.
Each key press moved a series of levers to swing a metal arm
containing two letters - normal and shifted - to strike a cloth
soaked in ink against the paper underneath.
There's no "one" key; to type a "1" you had to remember to type a
lower case "L." Forgetting to shift down after typing a $ sign often
left one with such gems as "$L50" for "$150." [Editor's note: if
you read email or memos that use a lower-case L for a one, you can be
pretty sure the sender learned to type one a typewriter without a "1"
key. dk]
The tab key - yes, it has tab settings-- is on the upper right,
about where the delete key is on my keyboard. The backspace key, on
the other hand, is on the other hand-- roughly where I expect the
escape key or the tilde key to be on the computer.
The number keys on my keyboard also have symbols above them for
the shifted position. Here is a table showing how the typewriter and
the computer compare.
shifted key shifted key on
key on a Mac my typewriter
1 ! no 1 key;
use lowercase L
2 @ "
3 # #
4 $ $
5 % %
6 ^ _
7 & &
8 * '
9 ( (
0 ) )
- _ *
; : :
, < ,
. > .
/ ? ?
On my Mac there is a single-quote/double-quote key in the same
position that the manual typewriter has the cent symbol ¢ and
the @ symbol. There is also a one-half/one-quarter key to the right
of the P, where the Mac has the left bracket [ key.
Ordinary Typing
Typing is pretty much the same once you get past the enormous
keystrokes needed to make an impression (especially on seven copies).
Tactile response is firm and accompanied by a comforting "clack" as
the arm smacks the platen. However, my typing speed is definitely
limited to 20 wpm or so. In some ways, that's better; since becoming
a typist on a computer I've become rather long-winded, sort of like
Stephen King in the era of The Stand and beyond (Carrie was written
on a typewriter).
[Editor's note: I can verify that long-winded
business. dk]
At the end of a line, you hear a bell go "ding" when you are about
5 characters from the preset margin. This gives you enough warning to
finish or hyphenate a word before you run out of space. If you run
out of space but only need a character or two, there's the
handy-dandy margin override (margin release) key that lets you type
right out to the edge of the page.
Computers Inherit the Line Feed
Once you finish a line, however, you must push the lever on the
platen to move the carriage (carriage = platen, knobs, margin
controls, paper - the part that slides back and forth) to the next
line and to the left edge of the paper.
Early computers, emulating typewriters when printing with
typewriter-like mechanisms called daisywheel printers, distinguished
between a return to the beginning of the line and a carriage advance,
called a Line Feed (LF) and a carriage return only (CR). ASCII
numbers were assigned to these functions for early printers, and it
has been an unending source of irritation that Mac files use one
symbol to end a paragraph while PC files use the other. This is the
cause of some of those odd emails you get from time to time that have
excruciatingly long lines of text without a line wrap.
On an electric typewriter, the carriage return arm was superseded
by a "Return" key (which is why it's called "Return" and not "Enter"
on the main keyboard) that used an electric motor to pull the
carriage back to the left side of the paper.
I remember typing on an old TRS-80, watching the text
automatically wrap at the end of a line when a word didn't fit. The
machine was valuable for that feature alone.
In modern printers, the print head moves across the paper, as
moving paper is the weak link in the design of printers. Just compare
the number of paper jams you have had to the number of print head
problems to see what I mean. On a typewriter, however, it was much
easier and simpler to just move the paper instead of moving the
entire typing mechanism of hundreds of little levers and keys.
Correcting Misteaks
The other principal advantage a computer has involves correcting
errors. On a manual typewriter, there's no spelling checker (just
you), so you have to be a little more responsible when typing.
A small lever on the front shifted the ribbon I have from black to
red. The ribbon is two-toned, and so just shifting the ribbon up
presents a new color.
You could buy "correcting ribbon," which had a white powdery film
instead of the red color, and by backspacing and typing the same
letter again with the ribbon shifted, you could eradicate mistakes.
Otherwise, it was liquid paper, which had to dry completely before
typing could resume. There was also correcting paper, which was
similar to the ribbon but came in little paper strips you held
between the keys and paper when typing to erase mistakes.
I made the mistake of using some adhesive white tape, sold as an
easy-fix solution, on an English paper in high school, and got a "C"
on the paper because it "looked like it had the measles."
My first computer-processed papers could only be printed on green
and white paper with alternating color bands, which annoyed my
college professors as well.
Imagine what it was like to type on a screen for the first time
and be able to backspace over something you wrote, retype it, and
even save it for later editing. Everyone who got a computer thought
they would finally be able to write their novel (I'm still working on
mine). The TRS-80 (we called 'em Trash 80's back in the 70's) didn't
support cut and paste as far as I recall (I remember that innovation
appearing in AppleWorks - the original AppleWorks for the Apple II
computers), so only strategic editing was possible.
Interesting, isn't it, that there is still this one function that
typewriters are better at than computers - filling out forms,
especially multipart paper-only forms. If not for this fact,
typewriters would have completely disappeared long ago.
Well, I finished my purchase orders and returned my loyal Royal to
its display position on the bookcase. It was nice remembering the old
days, and I hope you enjoyed the trip with me!
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