The last generation of typewriter repairmen (2010)

A mechanical typewriter has no opinions. There will never be a squiggly line telling you that you did something wrong. It will never turn itself off because you took too long. You never have to wake it up.

It is always there. Ready for you. When you want to use it. That’s a lot of comfort and reassurance for a child.

I constantly use the last one because its simple daisy wheel design and buckling spring keys that feel just like my IBM Model M keyboard (since the latter came from the former), but I have to admit it is a weighty, barely 'portable' typewriter.

One of these days I'm gonna make good on my threat to reverse engineer just enough of the PS2 protocol to mount a raspberry pi zero, some sort of small screen, and some rechargeable batteries inside the upper case margins of this keyboard so it can be a buckling-spring-powered Alphasmart with SD card.

The Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11187604 - Feb 2016 (4 comments)

They're also among the last consumer goods you can actually get repaired. And it's not like it's hard to find a repair shop most places.

Good Riddance!

He then moved onto coin counting machines, this I do remember quite well. They were fully mechanical with a spinning disc, not too dissimilar to a meat slicer, and the coins would filter off and pass through a channel & mechanical counter into cloth bags. In most machines the coins would be pre-sorted, this would be bagging up say 200 coins per batch. The heavy cotton bags were then sealed with lead crimps. These machines were fully mechanical, every component could be swapped out and adjusted. [1] looks very much like the early ones I remember, but I knew the electric ones. These machines were full of rubber drive belts and micro switches.

Many things in our house were stored in those cotton bags, they were great and I’ve still got quite a few to this day. He also collected the used lead seals from them. Every year or so we’d smelt them down into lead bricks to sell for scrap. He built a 'blast furnace' in the garden powered by a 1950s cylinder Hoover, they sucked at one end and blew out the other! Image searching it looks similar to a ZA55 Electrolux [2].

Sometime in the late 1970s the machines changed and gradually became electronic. They had modules you just changed, the display unit was about the size of an A5 folder with a row of Nixie tubes along one edge; I had loads of dead modules to play with as a kid - if only I’d have kept them!

They then moved onto LED modules and with even fewer moving parts in the machine. It was about this time my dad retired, he was getting fed up with the job too. He didn’t want to be the engineer, yes he did wear a white coat over his suit for work, who just changed modules. He loved the mechanical and problem solving aspect of his work.

Slight diversion, but sometimes customers would place 'traps' for the engineers. He went to one place and found a coin in a place he knew a coin could never get to. He Araldited it back in the same place. When he left the owner asked "did you find any money in there" and my dad replied "if there was any in there, it's in the same place".

Another tale, a toll tunnel used their system and he was called in because it kept jamming. He worked through the problem but during that found a lot of coins 'lost' under the conveyor belt between the toll booths and the cash room. The curios thing is, for years the cash collected by the toll booths had exactly matched the cash counted…..

Sorry third one, when we had a telephone installed there should have been a 6-9 month waiting time, but because my dad serviced the machines which did the wages for a lot of companies we not only got one quickly, it was also on the priority repair list along with doctors. It was still a party line, we shared the phone line with the neighbour and had to press a button on the phone to 'claim' the line. If the office wanted to get in touch with him urgently, they would phone the customers they thought he was at that day.

I was also one of the first people in the UK to spend a £1 coin. Because my dad had to configure the machines he initially he had blanks but then had real coins. On the day they were launched he let me have some to spend, so I bought my breakfast at collage with them at about 08:30 on launch day. That was before banks opened so 'normal' people wouldn't have had access to them.

I know I’ve rambled, but this triggered some memories and I though to add them here and hope someone enjoyed reading. I will add this to my "family scrapbook" as I've not thought about these for years.

[1] https://www.catawiki.eu/l/16108097-icc-intercount-v2-bank-co...

[2] Sorry for deep link https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/FgoAAOSweFJfZjmg/s-l300.jpg

[1] https://myoldtypewriter.com/