[HN Gopher] Apple typewriter ban memo (2020)
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Apple typewriter ban memo (2020)
Author : rafaepta
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-06-21 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writingball.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writingball.blogspot.com)
| ginko wrote:
| > ... 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Go to a doctor's office.
|
| They live there.
| jrajav wrote:
| What then should we call technologies that have multiple
| significantly lower cost, more versatile, more ubiquitous,
| and more interoperable alternatives available?
| loeg wrote:
| They're still around _and_ obsolete. They continue to exist
| solely due to regulatory capture in the healthcare industry.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's because faxed signatures have legal recognition and
| nothing electronic does.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yep, the last HP LaserJet Color printer I bought came with
| fax. I must admit, I kind of wondered why.
| drob518 wrote:
| So they could charge you more money for the increase in
| "value" embodied in the product. (sarc)
| jdougan wrote:
| I'd call them obsolescent, not obsolete.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| 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
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| Neither is a computer without a network connection.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| opless wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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?
| zb wrote:
| 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.
| beala wrote:
| 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...
| teeray wrote:
| 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.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| That's not a typewriter no matter how much you'd want to make
| that connection.
| alexjplant wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.
| yosef123 wrote:
| 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.
| mproud wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| How do you know it was typed on a typewriter?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
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