My anticipation rising, I round a corner to find the object of my quest sitting quietly and humbly on a table in a messy garage. It looks as though it hasn’t been touched in ages, and I’m not certain it’s 100% functional. I peck at the keys a few times—at least they seem to be in good condition.
Its portable companion sits nearby, looking equally sad and neglected, yet somehow hopeful. Unfortunately, I’m only here for the one and not the other, so the portable will have to wait.
“Looks OK,” I remark to the seller. “Oh, and the instruction manual?”
“Oh yes,” she says, and dashes off.
She returns with a small booklet, yellowed a bit with age, ripped lightly in places, but still perfectly readable. I’m satisfied.
“So, it’s $65, right?” I ask, pulling out my wallet.
The seller replies, “yes,” trying to catch her Dachshund, who had just escaped into the garage.
The transaction completed in cash, I pick up my bounty and lug it to my waiting Nissan Sentra. After phoning home to describe my new treasure to my mother, who I am sure would relay the message to everyone else, I pull out of the suburban driveway. After some additional navigation, I finally speed up onto highway 30 west, homeward bound.
One and a half hours later, I’m back home. I carefully pull my new treasure out of my car, and with my iPad held tight between my ribs and my arm, I ring the doorbell. My youngest brother and sister let me in, excited to see what I’m holding in my hands.
I make my way to the dining room table and set it down gently. Its four rubber feet are still soft and pliable, so it makes hardly any noise as I set it down. Then comes the moment of truth…
I press a key. That key triggers a set of complex mechanisms to create a letter… but not a digital letter. No, instead the round, glass-covered key moves a series of levers to send a typebar slamming into an ink-impregnated ribbon, rendering a single letter on a sheet of paper.
My Underwood Standard No. 5 typewriter has a new home.
All Good Things
Ever heard the old saying, “All good things must come to an end?” Well, it’s true, but not to the extent that we may believe.
The Underwood Typewriter Company was eventually bought out by Olivetti and soon thereafter ceased manufacturing typewriters altogether. Sometime after that, the woman who had owned my Underwood passed away, and the typewriter was posted on Craigslist by her daughter. Eight decades after it was made, my Underwood has therefore outlasted both its original owner and its makers. And yet, with a little time and care, it is once again forging thoughts as quickly and impressively as the day it was made.
http://www.youtube.com/#/watch?v=8vYFmTaQnGU
And yet, most people would call my typewriter obsolete, rendered a relic by personal computers. But what is obsolete?
More Than Meets the Eye
If obsolete means useless, my Underwood is nothing of the sort. If obsolete means ungainly compared to “modern” devices, again, my Underwood dodges the label (after all, given the choice between cheap, sticky rubber cap keyboards and my Underwood, I’d pick the Underwood any day). If obsolete means incompatible with new technology, well, my Underwood can employ a sneaky workaround when it comes to compatibility.
Optical character recognition has advanced to record accuracy in recent years, so much so that in some instances the human eye would be hard pressed to best it. With that in mind, my Underwood needs nothing more to interface with modern technology than a good scanner, some OCR software, and a decent computer. Even technology made twenty years ago can be a headache to interface with new computers—my poor PowerBook 180, whose exotic ports and painfully small floppy drive can’t hope to transfer large files at anything approaching the rate of a fast document scanner, is a good example.
Beyond that, there is also a simple DIY solution that can turn a regular typewriter into a USB keyboard without interfering with the original mechanisms of the machine. While I wouldn’t dream of doing this to my desk-bound Underwood, a portable typewriter would make a good ergonomic candidate for this sort of transformation. I imagine the duo of a portable manual typewriter and an iPad working in sync would be about the most amazing anachronism anyone could imagine.
Conclusion
But, to return to my point, what is obsolescence? Well, it is my opinion that obsolescence is the point where the cost and inconvenience of maintaining and using old technology exceeds that of equally-capable new technology. If you take into account the headaches of modern computing and the relative serenity of typewriter use and maintenance, I think it’s safe to say typewriters are nowhere near obsolete.
If you can say truthfully that your old Mac, be it a PowerBook, Power Mac, Compact Mac, iBook, iMac, or whatever, is less of a hassle to you than the use or cost of a new Mac would be, then your Mac is not obsolete. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.