Typewriter memories
Olivetti Typewriter
Originally uploaded by plindberg.
I learned how to be a journalist using a typewriter I bought for £10 in a market in Essex.
Not in the 1970s, but in the 1990s, when I fully expected my journalism training course to be showing me the trade using the computers it was practised with. But both the college and the students were broke; there were no computers to learn journalism with, and we were told to go and buy our own typewriters.
So I picked one up as cheaply as I could (my finances were about as bad as they ever got - I entertained only fantasies about buying a computer of my own) and literally bashed out articles using the brute force in my fingertips.
The first time I used a computer to do any journalism was when I started doing day shifts (for about £40 a day, if I remember rightly) on the Cambridge Evening News. At the time the newspaper had a very old mainframe system in use, known to me as Press 11 but it might well have a more common commercial name.
The computers were dumb terminals that only ran a very specialised text editing and transfer system. Every element of data was a story - to send an electronic memo to another member of staff (the closest thing we had to email), you had to create a new story and send it directly to that person's 'basket', the term we used to refer to someone's electronic list of stories-in-progress.
The reporters used this simple text mail system to send one another jokes and wisecracks about the more senior editors. Official memos were circulated by someone on newsdesk and copied to everyone's basket - a primitive sort of mailing list.
The subeditors used Press 11 too, but several of them had two computers on their desks, the second being a Mac intended for use in the layout process. The Press 11 terminals were solely dedicated to the writing and editing of text, the Macs were essential for putting that text into a newspaper format.
Sometimes, on a night or weekend shift when I had little to do, I'd slink over to the subs desk and have a play with the Macs. One of them had an internet connection and I'd sometimes try to connect and have a play. But of course connecting itself took an age, and the dial-up was hardly very zippy even by the standards of the day. I never managed to play much before guilt, or perhaps a ringing telephone or the sound of someone approaching the newsroom door made me switch it off.
Labels: writing
