Typewriter woes

Från: Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
> On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 10:11, Benct Philip Jonsson
> <bpj@...> wrote:
>>> The breve was also a problem back then. I
>>> could fake a caron by striking both an acute
>>> and a grave accent on the same letter, though,
>>> and that had to do most of the time.
>
> You must have had a different typewriter from me;
> acute + grave was circumflex on my typewriter (and
> IIRC that was the official way of producing a
> circumflex, too).
>
Mine was a Swedish make and I guess there was no official
need for circumflexes at all!  However the machine
had a half-backstep which allowed me to fake not
only circumflexes but a plethora of ligatures, not
only _ae, oe_, but also _ao, au, ou, uu, oo, uo_
and every consonant+ _h_ you could think of. My
early conlangs had tons of those in addition to
slashed and barred letters! :-)  I remember I used
to use an over-slashed s to symbolize a long _s_,
and then ligature this with _h_ And imagine my
rendering of barred long _s_! :-/

Från: Michael Poxon <mike@...>
>
> My high point was when my linguistics professor
> gave me a 'golf-ball' with the IPA symbols on.
> Must have been early to mid 1980's but even then
> she was very fond of computational linguistics, I
> seem to recall.
I never had one of those.  They had one or two at
the fonetix lab but undergraduates weren't allowed
to borrow them.  My high point was when I got a
typewheel which could type thorn and eth.  The flop
side was that I had to go to my dad's house to use it,
so overstruck _pb_ and _d/_ had a prolonged lease of
life anyway! :-)

Från: Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
>
> At the time I was writing the diss. I invested in
> a very nice Smith-Corona (IIRC) electric, on which
> one could interchange several of the key-heads. It
> also had a dead key.
Only one?  My typewriter of course also had only one,
but I had two characters, acute and grave, on it.
I seem to recall that my dad's typewheel machine
had two, the other one with circumflex and diaeresis,
but since it had a third shift it may have had just
one key with acute, grave and diaeresis.

> The extra heads cost  each,
> grr. Since this was in Generative Phonology days,
> I needed alpha-beta-gamma-delta, square and curly
> brackets, some accents and a few others.
My dad had an extra wheel with mathematical/chemical
symbols, so there were half the greek alphabet, some
random (to me) symbols, braces and brackets.
He also had an 'italic' wheel and a kind of fakebold mode
on the machine.  No ideas what those extra frills cost,
but I suspect his employer paid for the lot or it
was all deductible! :-)

> No schwa--
> IIRC IPA chars. were available as a very expensive
> set, not individually....
As I said I got to view such a set from afar...

> It also had the half-
> roll feature for doing super- and sub-script
> things. Very handy.
Yes, very!

> I used that machine for the Kawi Lexicon that I
> edited and "prepared for publication" (i.e. typed...)--
> lots of underdots, over-hyphens for macron. Very
> time consuming... and it kept the White-Out people
> in business....
>
> Along about 1990 I started looking into "word
> processors", Brother and the rest. Settled on a
> Casio thing, where each key could do 4 chars, by
> using something like a "control" key. It required
> a rather expensive ink- or ribbon-cartridge, but
> could also type without that on thermal paper
> (also expensive). It could remember about 2 pages
> worth of text, which could be edited and then
> printed out.
I had a similar Brother thing with three chars
on each key.  It also allowed backspacing/overstriking
so I had a lot of fun with it.  The flop side was
that it belonged to mi High School so I had to
return it before I went to University...


> Almost a computer..... (so I
> thought). By the mid-90s it was discontinued, and
> the cartridges became extinct. Then I discovered
> multiple-foot rolls of thermal fax paper (shades
> of Jack Kerouac!) which was cheap but flimsy, and
> had to be chopped into 8.5x11 and wasn't worth the
> trouble. The poor thing is still gathering dust on
> a shelf and probably still works, but it's now
> useless and unwanted, and I haven't the heart to
> put it in the trash. It served me well...
I lost a lot of stuff because the thermal paper went
white after a couple of years.

> One final tale of woe: in 1982, when I paid very
> good money for a _used_ Apple II,
I got my first computer, a Macintosh Plus with a
dazzling megabyte of RAM‑in about 1988.  It came
with a dot matrix tractor feed printer, and it wasn't long
before I got an app for editing/creating bitmap
fonts.  The printer had twice the resolution of the
screen, so if I used a nominal 12pt typesize in
my docs and had a 24pt font installed I could get
what I considered hi res printouts!

Från: Gary Shannon
>
> Back in the 1960's, while I had no use for
> linguistic symbols, I did need a lot of
> mathematical symbols, Greek alphabet, and the like
> in what I typed. I had a portable, manual Smith
> Corona typewriter that had two keys with
> changeable type. I had a large box full of little
> snap-lid plastic boxes, each box with a little clip-
> on type head that hooked onto either of the two
> changeable keys. Each type head came with a little
> key-chip that snapped onto the key itself, showing
> the graphic representation of whatever symbol was
> installed on that key.
>
> Using shift, I could have up to four different
> special characters at a time on the keyboard. If I
> needed more, I could stop typing, swap in a new
> special character, type it, and keep right on
> going. It was very cool.
Sounds very cool, but kinda messy.  Didn't any of
those clip-ons get lost?


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
 à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
 ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
 c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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