Apple typewriter memo (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Apple typewriter memo (2020)

writingball.blogspot.com

64 pointsrafaepta54 comments

Personally, I don’t see this move as a negative. It implies that a company believes in its product and potentially wants to improve it. Usually, you can tell when a product is not used by its creator(s), and it’s not a good experience.

I would argue there is a glaring problem with the memo: it is basically written from the perspective of someone who writes memos. Computers were fantastic replacements for many uses of typewriters back then, allowing people to do much more with greater ease. Yet they were not universal replacements for typewriters.

The article pointed out one glaring problem, one that was present with the Apple II (along with other microcomputers of the era): it could only display uppercase text. It got around that by displaying capital letters in inverse. A related problem was the limited display width. While a typed page is roughly 80 characters wide, the Apple II could only display 40 characters per line. Thankfully the Apple II was expandable. 80 column cards and cards that displayed lowercase text were created, but Apple didn't introduce such capabilities themselves until the Apple IIe. Even then you needed to buy their 80 column card (but at least that standardized things).

Another hitch was actually typing lowercase letters. You needed to do a shift-key modification for applications to register the shift-key being pressed when a letter was typed. Again, Apple didn't standardize this until the Apple IIe.

Of course, those weren't the only issues. Computerization may have been taking over the world, but so were reams of paper. While most of those additional reams of paper were being generated by computers, much of that paperwork existed before. Forms, in particular, almost necessitated the use of a typewriter. While I would hate to line up forms in a typewriter, such feats were nearly impossible with printers.

So I guess you're right in some circumstances: computers were not a good experience. That doesn't negate the times when they offered a far better experience. Whether you're writing memos or novels, the ability to go back and edit text outweighs the drawbacks (never mind all of the advancements that were just around the corner). But a blanket ban on typewriters was myopic.

The uppercase/lowercase limitations and 80/40 characters don't necessarily prevent replacing typewriters. They weren’t typing text in BASIC, they were using Apple Writer [0], which did support uppercase letters. This wasn't a WYSIWYG editor, so the text on screen does not have to exactly match the printed output.

[0] https://archive.org/details/apple-writer-a2-v1.1-ph/componen...

While it's true that none of that prevents computers from replacing typewriters, it becomes more difficult to convince people that computers are better than typewriters.

Put another way, I grew up with those 8-bit machines. I preferred using those 8-bit machines for writing since it was easier to edit documents, which was important because I was young and learning to type (along with learning spelling, grammar, etc.). Using a typewriter wouldn't so much be an exercise in frustration as it would be one of mental anguish. On top of that, I wouldn't have the expectation of screen text mapping reasonably well to the printed page.

On the other hand, people who had experience with typewriters (or even 80-column terminals) would have that expectation. And they would be bumping into that mismatch whenever they were dealing with indenting or centering or lists or any number of other layout options. They would also be more accustomed to the writing/editing process with a typewriter, so they would be less inclined to view it as problematic. The flip side is that they would be unaccustomed to the writing/editing process on a computer, so they would be more inclined to view those quirks as problematic. On top of that, the process of using a word processor would be completely different from using a typewriter. Think of over-typing: (fake) bold, underlining, and so on. It is less labor intensive to do on a computer, but the average secretary would have trouble seeing that when they have to navigate the then cryptic user interfaces of software.

Proving that something is possible probably wasn't the issue here. Proving that something is better, which isn't hard to do even considering the primitive word processing software for the Apple II of that era, isn't the issue here. Dealing with the expectations of people is.

> ... and typewriters still aren't obsolete!

I guess I'm living in a particular professional niche but I haven't seen a typewriter in ages. Let alone seen anyone using one.

I have not seen a physical fax machine in over a decade; haven’t sent a fax in at least 4 years.

Yet they are still around and not obsolete.

Go to a doctor's office.

They live there.

What then should we call technologies that have multiple significantly lower cost, more versatile, more ubiquitous, and more interoperable alternatives available?

They're still around and obsolete. They continue to exist solely due to regulatory capture in the healthcare industry.

My local hospital system was bought by one of the big city systems. I think quite a few of the older docs basically quit because of dealing with the newer electronic health records system. The younger docs seem OK with it. Never seen anyone use a typewriter.

As a patient much better. No more faxing lab work to the lab and it's back in hours.

It's because faxed signatures have legal recognition and nothing electronic does.

That's not true, digital signatures have been legally valid since 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_in_Globa...

Yep, the last HP LaserJet Color printer I bought came with fax. I must admit, I kind of wondered why.

So they could charge you more money for the increase in “value” embodied in the product. (sarc)

Possibly. But I really like their more up-market color laser printers. They have always worked flawlessly for me. Their inkjets (and everyone else's inkjets) on the other hand ...

I'd call them obsolescent, not obsolete.

Plenty of businesses and governments in the USA still only accept documents via fax. So fax machines and fax services will continue to exist just to service them. I don't think there's a single business that requires you to hand in typewritten documents.

I am going to guess that most fax machines are not dedicated machines but a part of combination of printer scanner fax. It wouldn’t be obvious

Last time I saw one (working and in real life, rather than TV or a museum) was the late 80s or early 90s. And even then, it was in a second-hand charity sale.

Typewriters typically are not connected to the internet. I.e. nobody can hack them, remotely sabotage them, or hoover up every word you type. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility that we'll come to appreciate those features again within our lifetimes.

Neither is a computer without a network connection.

Fortunately, espionage wasn't invented until after the typewriter's obsolescence - certainly no one has ever used a typewriter in the pursuit of espionage before! - and intelligence agencies the world over thus would be forced to respond from a standing start.

Huh? It was fairly common for typewriter ribbons to be destroyed where confidential information was typed, as it was possible to acquire previously typed characters.

Obviously. But how obviously to someone who assumes anything without an Internet connection is constitutionally unsurveillable thereby? How does it occur to you to destroy a ribbon, or consider all the other methods by which a sufficiently motivated adversary will defeat your toy air gap, if you believe your air gap isn't a toy?

Of course we are deep into the realm of movie plots already, where we've fantasized a superstate-or superhuman-level adversary still somehow capable of being defeated by "going crude." But if that's where we're going to hang out, why half-ass it?

I realize that your /s key is broken, but ...

... you would be shocked by how much could be surveilled back then. Pretty much any voice communicated were sent in the clear. It didn't much matter whether it was sent over wire or over the air. Snail mail was virtually always sent as clear text. Even digital communications were rarely encrypted. Even ignoring the legality of it, few people had the creativity to envision a world of secure communications or wanted to expend their (limited) computing power on it. There were, of course, exceptions like the military.

Who's being sarcastic? My point is precisely that a typewriter is not a magic bullet, and I lived back then; I assure you I am very well aware.

I really do grow frightened of people's reading comprehension on the internet, having observed a qualitative decline especially in the last twelve months. Granted, this seems more due to indolence than actual impairment, thus far at least, but atrophy must eventually tell.

During the Cold War, Russians bugged typewriters to broadcast what was being typed: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-s...

The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.

It's not uncommon for used typewriters on ebay to include the old ribbon, along with the last fifty thousand characters the previous owner typed...

Certainly that would be the case with film ribbons, but I don't see how typed character history could be obtained from a cloth/cotton ribbon, especially since they were as I recall reversible (would spool one dirction, then the other when reaching the end), meaning the previous typing would be overwritten multiple times.

I’ve seen a lot of “distraction-free” writing apps up to even e-ink screens glued to mechanical keyboards. There’s still plenty of typewriters out there—they’re just paper-free now.

That’s not a typewriter no matter how much you’d want to make that connection.

They are but they aren't.

Excepting niche cases (like filling out carbons in triplicate at car dealerships and such) typewriters are pretty anachronistic. It is, however, amusing that over the past decade as things have digitized fewer people seem to own printers. Without a printer a computer fails at the simple task that a typewriter is inherently designed for - putting words to paper. Anecdotally <50% of my friends have a printer in their home... I wonder how that compares to typewriter ownership 50 years ago?

Regardless it's pretty clear that the author of the site is a big typewriter fan hence their statement. I find it contrived, but hey, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.

Obsolete doesn't mean useless. Typewriters are obsolete! I use a lot of things that are obsolete, but that doesn't make them not obsolete.

Indeed I use my printer once every two months or so, as a very rough estimate. And then it’s usually for myself rather than for someone or something else.

For example I sometimes (not always) like printing out papers to read them “offline”, or diagrams when I want to take notes on them.

I don’t miss dealing with paper because I had to.

Ownership of printers is so low because the usefulness of putting words to paper is correspondingly low these days, though, because so many things are online or at least digital. 20-30 years ago though printers were far more common than typewriters before them.

I was a gifted/troubled kid who was taking high school classes half time in the 4th grade at the school I was later to attend as my regular high school.

Circa '81 or so they had a PDP-8/A with a printing terminal and two VT-61s which were unusual in that they had a block mode, though we ran a multiuser BASIC system that didn't take advantage of it until I looked up in the manual how to put it into block mode.

My understanding was that this system was designed for word processing at small newspapers where it would be used to do all the typesetting as well as incorporating classified ads and that a newspaper had ordered it and never taken delivery which was why we got a deal on it. It looked a lot like the "DEC Word Processor" in the article, particularly the dual disk drive.

The PDP-8/A had 32k words of 12 bits each, but regular pointers where 12 bits so it had a rather ugly scheme to access multiple pages of 4k words. We had the Crowther & Woods Adventure and a BASIC interpreter that could be used in single-user mode with the printing terminal and we could also boot it up with a three-user BASIC.

Years later my school got a VAX-11/730 and the PDP-8 was donated to the computer club that was advised by our new physics teacher and I tried plugging in one of the VT-61s into the same current loop plug that the printing terminal was plugged into and it caught on fire because of the dust inside, we cleaned the other one out good and managed to get it running again.

Given that the Apple ][+ had 64k of RAM addressable with 16 bit pointers it was probably a better machine than the 8/A overall, but the terminals for the 8/A were 80 columns whereas the ][ came with only a 40 column screen although 80 column cards for it were not unusual and when Apple made the late step of ASICizing the ][ they eventually built in an 80 column VDC.

If only they would make their word processor scroll up as one types on it, rather than typing from the top to the bottom of the page. When composing longer form documents, all the action happens at the bottom of the screen. In banning typewriters, they forgot what was great about them.

It’s 2025 and I bought 3 typewriters just this year. I’m fired.

'Qume' at this time meant daisywheel printer, what used to be called 'letter quality. Not dot matrix, the output looked like a nice typewriter. which it effectively was, just with a parallel port instead of a keyboard.

This was obviously satirical, with its tongue-and-cheek tone, name-bombing Ken, and the fact that seemingly escapes the blogger here it was typed on a typewriter!

Apple was an upstart company in its day, the anti-IBM, creative, expressive, rebellious. The memo may have been driving a point, but it was mostly just going for a laugh.

How do you know it was typed on a typewriter?

There were really only teletypes and dot-matrix printers available at that point.

Look at how "effective immediately" is underlined, and how inconsistent the letterforms are.

Also, 1980 is 5 years before the Apple LaserWriter, 11 years before TrueType, and 15+ years before "grunge" fonts were a thing.

The article mentions daisy wheel printers directly, so they must have been available. Daisy wheel printers existed to produce higher quality (text) output than what you would get from a dot matrix printer. There were many other types of impact printers that produced full letters (or even full lines of text) in one go, though I don't know how often they were connected to microcomputers.

To do letter Letter quality back then could also be done with a daisy wheel printer.

I was around "at that point", and there were a bewildering number of printer types, including daisy wheels and things that were basically converted typewriters, either of which could have produced output like that.

Some daisy wheel drivers would vary the spacing to "kern" the letters, but some wouldn't. If they didn't, what you got looked basically exactly like what you'd get on a typewriter.

On the one hand, we don't (hello Photoshop!)

On the other hand, it looks like the output of a typewriter (including individual variation amongst typed letters as the typewriter has small variations in the amount of ink that's used for each strike), and if the date on the letter is to be believed (1981) then using a typewriter would have been typical for the time.

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