this video on kids in the Phoenix area discovering the usefulness of old typewriters.
How you can not love what these kids are doing. I commented in the video that my belief is that civilization peaked with the advent of the commercial laser printer. For a generation raised on manual typewriters (they were still teaching that way in 1980 when I took typing), and even for those who used the later more convenient electric ones with automatic correction, the laser printer was a dreamlike technology that enabled new creative output beyond anything anyone had dreamt of.
All you needed was a laser printer and a little Mac SE, the old mini post office box style, and you could pretty much mock up anything. The first time I saw that set-up was in 1988 working on the campus newspaper in Salem. I was blown away. It changed newspapers almost overnight, antiquating centuries of established and evolving production techniques.
For a season, in the early nineties, it created a craft industry of published materials. Portland as we know it---the Portland of the 1990s---was created on this industry.
What happened? Well as I like to tell people, the thing about the 1980s, and especially the late 1980s, is that they represent as far as civilization got without the Internet.
Or more specifically, the world wide web, which was invented in August 1989, the same month that Hungarians started pouring across the Austrian border, trampling the barbed wire, and no one was stopping them on either side.
2 comments:
If you're in fourth grade, you get to type on typewriters and experience the magic of carbon paper in summer at Sherwood historical society. Magic. No politics.
I have learned from my wanderings that historical societies are treasure chests of cultural groundedness. They are on a list of types of places I will usually stop at, if I stumble upon one, for the reason you mentioned. You always get a nice local slant in their collections. One of my favorites is the White River Historical Society in Meeker, Colorado.
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