Steve Yelvington on Nostr: At my first daily newspaper job, we had a motley collection of manual typewriters, ...
At my first daily newspaper job, we had a motley collection of manual typewriters, some pica, some elite, no two of them matching. It was a combination guaranteed to put the fits into copyfitting.
Editing involved pencils, scrawling a combination of symbols and a modified alphabet -- a line under the w and u, a line over the n and m, for clarity's sake.
Cut and paste meant scissors and a gluepot. Dead copy was put on a literal spike, a sharpened wire set into a lead base, a perfect setup for a serious office injury.
New technology arrived in the mid-1970s, not in the form of computer-based editing, but in optical character recognition. Everyone got brand-new IBM Selectric typewriters. An OCR machine burped out punch tape to drive the typesetting machines. This made editing more difficult, as it required retyping.
Computer terminals arrived a couple of years later, and they were most welcome, even if the 5 MB hard drive filled up twice a day and crashed the system.
Editing involved pencils, scrawling a combination of symbols and a modified alphabet -- a line under the w and u, a line over the n and m, for clarity's sake.
Cut and paste meant scissors and a gluepot. Dead copy was put on a literal spike, a sharpened wire set into a lead base, a perfect setup for a serious office injury.
New technology arrived in the mid-1970s, not in the form of computer-based editing, but in optical character recognition. Everyone got brand-new IBM Selectric typewriters. An OCR machine burped out punch tape to drive the typesetting machines. This made editing more difficult, as it required retyping.
Computer terminals arrived a couple of years later, and they were most welcome, even if the 5 MB hard drive filled up twice a day and crashed the system.