Electric typewriters, like the one I blogged about last week, and the Selectric I've been playing with this week, have a wonderful feature: "Instant on."
Manual typewriters go one better: you just can't turn those things off. They're wireless! The worst you can do to them is rip the paper out or let the ribbons fade.
I love this instant-on feature. That's why, as we continue getting our house re-organized, I plan to have a few typewriters distributed around with paper loaded, waiting for me to pound out a few words when inspiration comes. Typewritten grocery lists, anyone? There's something for posterity!
There's also that "reliability" factor. I know that these mechanical wonders require a bit of maintenance. One of my machines has a card folded into a pocket that reads "to be removed only by certified by IBM technician." It's like an old-fashioned library card, and it has a couple dozen service entries logged across the 1970s.
But there's an accessibility to their mechanics that's not too daunting to someone with the time and perseverance to make things better. You can follow a belt from a to b, and swap out a part if you can find one. There are screws to tighten that make the keys strike harder or softer.
You can take one of these machines apart with simple tools, confident that you'll be able to put it back together, again.
This brings me to how I write with my computers.
This typewriter hobby is actually a return to an old obsession. Lean living in tight spaces has kept me working on computers for the last several years, but I was 100% manual typewriter until 1999.
And for me, it's always easiest to write when there's just words on a screen. Is this a generational thing? (Does it mean I'm old if I'm talking about "a generational thing?") I can't imagine most bloggers have to black out their entire desktop to get any work done. If I'd been born ten years later, I'd probably be a lot more comfortable with YouTube videos playing and banners flashing all across my visual field. Alas, I grew up playing this on this.
If I'd been born later I'd probably be more inclined to produce videos than write stories, too. And maybe I'd be richer.
But there's enough people like me out there who crave minimalist full-screen modes they they've been built into Avenir and MacJournal. I've recently gone to the even simpler (and free) Darkroom, since it produces plain, easily manipulated text files, and I can use it across Linux and Mac platforms. (If someone would port MacJournal to the Asus Eee I'd still be using that. But they'd probably have to change the name.)
Anyway, here's an idea: why doesn't somebody build a distribution of Linux (there's enough out there) that could boot immediately into a text-only editor? You could set it up with a boot-loader so that, when you turned on a laptop (my Asus Eee, for example) it would go straight to something like Darkroom - or even into a stripped down WordPerfect like I ran on that antique 1981 IBM. That way, if I was at a cafe, or on a bus, I could open the thing up and be typing within seconds. When I wanted the rest of the machine's functionality, rebooting while holding a key-combination would bring up the usual operating system. But doing most of my composition in a primitive but distration-free OS would do wonders for productivity.
That said, I suppose you could set up a distribution to do this from a thumb drive. The SD card that mounts flush into the Asus would be even better. Leave it in to boot into typewriter mode, pop it out when you wanted the full computer.
Hmm, I think I've just come up with another project to burn up some more writing time. I'll take my old 1999 Sony Vaio and learn how to boot it from a thumb drive. I'll install PC-DOS from 1981 on the drive. I'll load it with WordPerfect and write a batch file to launch WordPerfect automatically on start-up.
I know how to do a couple of those things. Learning the rest can't be that hard.
But it would be so much cooler to do it with Linux, no?
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