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Comment by ksenzee | Hacker News Reader

Typewriter repair was our family business too. My dad opened a repair shop in our garage in about 1980, and at its peak he had a handful of employees, repairing mostly IBM Selectrics for offices and schools in the Seattle metro area. I would wander out there when I was off school and watch him working, or any of the employees who didn't mind me hanging around. The timing was not great, and the family business didn't make it even all the way to his retirement, let alone to the next generation, but I can still smell that repair shop.

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My single parent father was a typewriter repairman. He visited offices to repair them, so I spent some of my early childhood in the car outside of various office buildings (highly illegal now, of course). The exact moment it ended was when we were watching the 1984 Super Bowl together (this was in January 1985). He saw the Apple Macintosh commercial and said "uh oh" (paraphrasing NSFW language). He went out and bought the Macintosh on the very first day it was available. I set it up and made a document on MacWrite. Another round of "uh oh." I hit print and the printer spewed garbage -- all of the first cables were defective so the printers didn't work. After he went back to the store and got the working printer cable he decided to find a new line of work.

You can't leave me hanging! What did he end up doing?

Real estate (built a few spec houses and then small scale landlord). His last client, BTW, was George Lucas' personal secretary. When she retired that was the end.

Sounds like he made a decent enough living and kept busy. Unless "The end" is an unhappy ending?

How did they recover / move on?

Pivoted to copier repair and opened a storefront copy/print shop. He somehow also knew how to operate an offset press (? I have no idea where he learned all this stuff) so he bought a secondhand offset press and moved it into the garage where the repair cubicles had been.

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