On the credenza behind my desk at work rests the typewriter that I took to college. It is an Olympia DeLuxe portable manual typewriter, with a platen long enough to take a sheet of letter paper inserted sideways. I use it every chance I get.
When I went to law school, I kept getting dinged by my writing professor because my papers were "too short". They complied with the page limits, but were nowhere near the word limits. It turned out that my problem was that I was using WordPerfect 5 and, just like I had with my typewriter, I was writing in Courier, which is a monospaced font. I never thought to try any other font. Once I shifted to Times New Roman, all was right with the world.
Proportional fonts still look wrong to my eye. That's pretty funny, when one considers that I am the office IT geek (which just means that I now more about computers than anyone else in-house). I use a lot of technology in my job and, other than that inestimable pile of crap known as Windows Vista, I'm pretty much at home with tech.
But I do like some of the older things. And I still have carbon paper.
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
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Thursday, July 23, 2009
5 comments:
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"And I still have carbon paper."
ReplyDeleteWhat color is it? When I used a typewriter (long time ago, galaxy far, far away...) I had a shelf unit on my desk with all the colors we used, plus letterhead paper and envelopes. It's another relic from those days before Nerdperfect and MS Word.
Miss Fit:
ReplyDeleteSee here!
Regards,
Frank
One of my earliest jobs was as a typographer and type designer.
ReplyDeleteModern typefaces have a higher x height, i.e., the lower case characters are proportionately nearer to uppercase characters in height.
It makes them a lot easier to read. Palatino is a good example of such a face.
The original Times Roman had a pretty puny x height, causing designers to create Times New Roman.
When I was about 23 and living in L.A., there was this prick client I had named Mr. Ross, who owned a small shoe/clothing store.
He was never satisfied, and once when he asked me to design his logo I got so frustrated by his rejection of so many sample logos, I finally said, "What do you want me to do, design a whole new type face?"
Determined to get the $50 I was charging back then for a logo design, I ended up creating a new typeface for the old creep.
Now, more than 30 years later, Ross Dress For Less is still using the face I designed.
Not bad for $50, huh?
Cheap bastard.
Humph!
ReplyDeleteI spend days with radios that still use vacuum tubes and another part with the latest sub fingernail sized 15million transistor containing chips. Along the way I've met fonts many of them Arial and Zapf dingbats that come to mind for favorites and oddities. However I still have three dot matrix printers that can punch 6 part NCR or carbon forms. They still make them both, the forms and the printers.
I also predate M$word, Wordperfect, Wordstar, and magic pencil. Long live TECO. For those that grok 9999[S$hte$the$$]$ you're likely old
or like VI and emacs.
In the olden days before there was WYSIWYG [what you see is what you get] which supplanted wygins [what you get is no surprize] and that was predated by IBM Selctric or maybe a olivetti and korectype. Many of us depended on yellow #2 and still do.
Technology is not always new. Or good.
Eck!
Marc, standard maroon-ish carbon paper. I remember the paper packs that the Navy used, with all the different colors (including "goldenrod").
ReplyDeleteWhat was strange was seeing those rolled into daisywheel printers that were driven by DEC workstations. Talk about a meshing of old an new tech!