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How did that work with things like college papers? Did students in the 60s and 70s learn how to type, or did they just handwrite everything?
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Oct 5, 2019 15:50
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My mom took keyboarding in high school and made money in college (70s) typing up papers for people. She noted that keyboarding for a computer wasn't quite the same, since you could edit much easier, and the keys didn't require the same force. She had a fancy typewriter, I think it was a wedding gift. It had spell check built in, it would beep if you typed a word it didn't recognize. It also had a memory to auto-type a page. She had saved my dad's resume, so you could make multiple copies on-demand. And it was all entirely obsolete by the time I would have had any use for it.
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Oct 5, 2019 16:23
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Memory-stored typing was cool because you hit a button and the typewriter would run off like it was possessed 
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Oct 5, 2019 16:39
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rndmnmbr posted:Keys were an old way of locking your workstation (and now you know the source of the term) by disconnecting the keyboard. Which is all the key did, IIRC. Back in college, one of my roommates tried something sneaky to keep the rest of us off his computer: he switched the wires from the key-lock and the turbo button to each other's connections on the motherboard. To unlock the keyboard, you had to disengage the turbo button. It actually worked for a couple of days until someone caught him in a moment of carelessness, "unlocking" it as he sat down.
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Oct 5, 2019 16:42
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Konstantin posted:How did that work with things like college papers? Did students in the 60s and 70s learn how to type, or did they just handwrite everything? From working at the library at my Alma Mater, I've understood that until the 1940s or so, you would write a thesis manuscript by hand, then submit it to a copy typist, who would hammer out your scribbles in legible type. Then you'd glue in any figures you needed.
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Oct 5, 2019 16:43
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:From working at the library at my Alma Mater, I've understood that until the 1940s or so, you would write a thesis manuscript by hand, then submit it to a copy typist, who would hammer out your scribbles in legible type. Then you'd glue in any figures you needed. I've been told that for some subjects like chemistry or math they had special typewriters just could make up math equations or even chemical structures haven't really looked into though.
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Oct 5, 2019 20:15
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I remember reading an old engineering thesis where the author included thanks to his girlfriend for writing in the math in a readable way after he typed the text.
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Oct 5, 2019 20:53
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My mom had an electric typewriter in the closet in the 90s, but I never used it. At our other office this woman who had been with the company since 1989 was still using hers because she would cry if they tried to switch her to a computer and everyone would feel bad and give it back; she hated any technology more recent than that and only begrudgingly got forced to use a cell phone. She was still doing job order forms and timesheets by putting templates into her typewriter until a quadruple bypass forced her to retire in like 2016.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:00
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That reminds me of “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He”. Jack H. Hetherington wrote the paper in 1975. He was its sole author, but he used the royal “we” throughout. He wished to submit it to a journal, but their style manual forbid using “we” when only one person had contributed. This is 1975, so Hetherington can’t just run a find & replace on the paper. So what does he do? He adds his cat as a co‐author, under the name “F. D. C. Willard”. The cat (Felis domesticus) was named “Chester” and his father was Willard.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:04
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I remember when I got a certificate for something in elementary school and some lady typed into an electric typewriter and then printed it onto a certificate. It was the coolest poo poo I had seen up to that point.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:06
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Also, when I was in school I learned how to use those in my technical drawing course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettering_guide You traced one letter/number after another with your ink-pen. It was surprisingly fast with even a bit of practice. That intermediate time where most normal text came through computers and printer, but anything unusual was made by hand and then optically copied was quite strange.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:24
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I’ve known people to keep typewriters around just to put addresses on envelopes. They didn’t want to gently caress around with a printer for the volume they were doing but they wanted it to look professional. I can’t say I blame them.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:29
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VictualSquid posted:Also, when I was in school I learned how to use those in my technical drawing course: What are the red lines for?
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Oct 5, 2019 21:35
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I read The Caine Mutiny a couple years back, and one of the naval officers' jobs was to manually cut and paste updates to their manuals and code books, which they picked up when they came to shore.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:36
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Cojawfee posted:What are the red lines for? Spacing guides, makes it easier to line all the letters up.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:41
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Cojawfee posted:What are the red lines for?
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Oct 5, 2019 21:42
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Neato
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Oct 5, 2019 21:49
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Stencils used to be very popular. I used one of those through college, it probably still is in some moving box in storage.  Back in those days there were supply stores near colleges and tradeschools with large racks of useful stencils, right next to the crayons for the younger kids. Starting from the common stuff, like circles or metric screwheads. Ending with more exotic stuff like NATO symbols or hydraulic logic circuits.
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Oct 5, 2019 22:11
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. This is giving me factorio nightmares.
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Oct 5, 2019 22:25
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. My high school geometry class in the 90s required a particular big fancy translucent green stencil called a GEOMETER that was available in the school store. Absolutely everyone had one sooner or later, unless you were on a seriously remedial math track. Damned if I can remember what it actually had, though, and google seems to have never heard of it.
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Oct 5, 2019 22:27
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. My mother worked in public schoolswhen I was a child and so had access to a teacher's supply shop. They had everything: transparency templates, Mobil playsets, crayons and markers in any size and color, oversize teaching props (huge plastic hearts and poo poo), all you need to facilitate any lesson plan. How did I spent my $5 a week allowance? Stencils, stencils, stencils. Didn't even know what half of them were useful for but boy did I have fun channeling my inner Moebius.
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Oct 5, 2019 22:47
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madeintaipei posted:They had everything: transparency templates, Mobil playsets, crayons and markers in any size and color, oversize teaching props (huge plastic hearts and poo poo), all you need to facilitate any lesson plan. New York's hottest club.
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Oct 5, 2019 22:56
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packetmantis posted:New York's hottest club. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5laG1E0Q4b8
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Oct 5, 2019 23:14
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packetmantis posted:New York's hottest club.  thank you for this!
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Oct 5, 2019 23:28
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packetmantis posted:New York's hottest club. gently caress that’s a great joke.
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Oct 6, 2019 00:00
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VictualSquid posted:To make it easier to find the correct distance between two letters. No ruler is going to tell me how to do keming! 
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Oct 6, 2019 03:51
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Konstantin posted:How did that work with things like college papers? Did students in the 60s and 70s learn how to type, or did they just handwrite everything? Right up into the late 80s big companies had a typing pool where you would send letters written in longhand and one of the “gals” would type it up.
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Oct 6, 2019 05:31
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Buttcoin purse posted:No ruler is going to tell me how to do keming! 
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Oct 6, 2019 05:47
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Guy Axlerod posted:My mom took keyboarding in high school and made money in college (70s) typing up papers for people. She noted that keyboarding for a computer wasn't quite the same, since you could edit much easier, and the keys didn't require the same force. We had a Smith-Corona that did the beeping when you misspelled something. It also had this fancy feature that you could type up to a line of text on a tiny screen and look over it for errors before committing it to a page. I had to actually use the thing for a couple of high school assignments. We had an old Macintosh but the printer was busted. We lived in the sticks, the internet wasn't a place for commerce and printers were expensive, so the Smith-Corona it was.
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Oct 6, 2019 06:06
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. I like the dedicated full bridge rectifier template. I found a link to a video of someone using one of these to draw a circuit on my phone earlier but now i can't find the link. Unperson_47 has a new favorite as of 06:44 on Oct 6, 2019 |
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Oct 6, 2019 06:41
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. That literally could be used as a prop in Star Trek and no one would notice. My mom had a bunch of things like that, but they were all much thinner. I feel like they were made to used to stencil rather than a pen? My dad also still had a slide rule which he tried to show me how to use and I could barely understand the basics of. Thank god for calculators. I don't know why this discussion reminds me of this, but older goons might remember having desks in school that had a hole in them for inkwells? Like how old were those desks? When the hell were inkwells last needed to be at hand? Like I know schoolls are cheap, but I am pretty sure even in the early part of the 20th century you didn't need to have an open inkwell next to you at all times when writing.
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Oct 6, 2019 08:01
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twistedmentat posted:I don't know why this discussion reminds me of this, but older goons might remember having desks in school that had a hole in them for inkwells? Like how old were those desks? When the hell were inkwells last needed to be at hand? Like I know schoolls are cheap, but I am pretty sure even in the early part of the 20th century you didn't need to have an open inkwell next to you at all times when writing. Dip pens hung on in some schools till ballpoints replaced them in the 1960s. Fountain pens are great to carry around in a pocket but dip pens are almost as good when sitting at a desk and they’re cheaper, with fewer breakable parts. Fountain pens can have feed issues, but dunking dipping the tip of a pen in ink always works. That’s true even if you are using a fountain pen: dipping it in ink will bypass any feed issues. Besides which, the fountain pen still needs to be refilled pretty regularly so why not keep the ink well around? JFK used dip pens, but to be fair that’s partly because it was a good way to mint souvenirs at signing ceremonies.  There’s a comic I wish I could find right now about a vagrant who goes into a bank and someone asks what business he could possibly have in there. He was sucking up the bank’s ink in his fountain pen, which illustrates that even poor folk might own fountain pens while banks still had dip pens and inkwells in the lobby.
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Oct 6, 2019 08:32
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twistedmentat posted:I don't know why this discussion reminds me of this, but older goons might remember having desks in school that had a hole in them for inkwells? Like how old were those desks? When the hell were inkwells last needed to be at hand? Like I know schoolls are cheap, but I am pretty sure even in the early part of the 20th century you didn't need to have an open inkwell next to you at all times when writing. My primary school had those desks when I finished in the late 90s, and those desks would have been around since the 50s at least. We weren't a poor school, but I guess the administration never felt the need to replace them, and to be fair they were still in decent condition.
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Oct 6, 2019 08:46
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The inkwell holder found new life as a convenient place to store pencil shavings.
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Oct 6, 2019 09:04
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doctorfrog posted:I read The Caine Mutiny a couple years back, and one of the naval officers' jobs was to manually cut and paste updates to their manuals and code books, which they picked up when they came to shore.
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Oct 6, 2019 10:11
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My Lovely Horse posted:Looseleaf binders are common in libraries, particularly law libraries, even today. They're publications that get updated so frequently that the library simply receives and exchanges only the relevant pages. I wrote technical documentation, and that's how it worked in their physical form. Whole pages would be replaced, usually with changes highlighted. Eventually the revision count would get too high, and they would issue a whole new book. By the time I was around, they were only doing electronic distribution. CDs when I started, DVD not long after, and Download not much longer after that. That first DVD was marked "Book 17" or whatever, even though they had never actually issued a physical book in that series. We did download updates, but we couldn't rely on those too much. Some of the guys were on dial-up connections in third-world countries, and others worked sites where internet connections were not permitted, they could only bring in the officially branded CD/DVDs, and use them on a laptop that remained on-site.
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Oct 6, 2019 13:43
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twistedmentat posted:
My son had to learn how to use a dip pen in second grade last year. In the Czech Republic.
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Oct 6, 2019 13:57
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:From working at the library at my Alma Mater, I've understood that until the 1940s or so, you would write a thesis manuscript by hand, then submit it to a copy typist, who would hammer out your scribbles in legible type. Then you'd glue in any figures you needed.
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Oct 6, 2019 13:58
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Techmoan takes a look at a laser thingy without a laser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrHxdQ0XvOc
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Oct 6, 2019 14:11
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VictualSquid posted:Stencils used to be very popular. I teach graphics to high school kids in Australia and while a majority of the course is CAD based there's a section that's entirely manual drafting which I kind of like cause it makes the first steps into CAD far easier. I have a stack of stencils floating around mostly to do with ISO bolts and architechtural items. The sets of elipse templates are the most used though because with the time I have to teach manual drafting teaching kids how to drawing an elipse by hand isn't feasable.
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Oct 6, 2019 14:24
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