typewriter

For their final episode, the Crave team does... well, exactly what they always do. Donald goes nuts for a free toy adapter that can create an unholy union between Legos and Tinker Toys. Bonnie recounts her dramatic day of technology detox. And in Geek News, Eric gives his 2 cents on "The Hunger Games" movie.

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I'm having flashbacks to high school typing class, caged in a room full of incessantly clacking keys. I was likely one of the last students to ever have to hunt and peck my way through "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy hen" on a typewriter.

If you stick around long enough, what's old becomes new again. Hammacher Schlemmer came up with a most-excellent press release headline: "Hammacher Schlemmer Introduces The Classic Manual Typewriter." It's as if the classic manual typewriter had never existed before. What crazy alternate universe is this?… Read more

Creating art with that splendidly elaborate gadget known as the typewriter is, of course, nothing new.

We're all familiar with the more, shall we say, prosaic variety--as famously produced by Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, and all the rest of those pre-personal-computer literati types (or typers).

There's even plenty of non-word-based typewriter art. Leopoldo Maler's flaming sculpture "Hommage" is a favorite of this particular keyboard jockey. And my wannabe graphic-designer/art-historian side loves H.N. Werkman's '20s-era "Tiksels" (think ASCII art meets modernist abstraction).

The "Chromatic Typewriter," however, seems to have found its way into new territory. … Read more

Later this month, IBM will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Selectric typewriter.

Released on July 31, 1961, the Selectric was unarguably a game-changer in the typewriter space. The device--which took seven years to develop, due mainly to its 2,800 parts--featured a "golf ball" head that moved across the page as users typed. Thanks to that head, the typewriter was the first of its kind to eliminate carriage return, IBM said.

The Selectric has also been tapped as an inspirational predecessor to today's word-processing programs. Users could add different golf balls to the device, allowing them … Read more

We're losing the typewriter as the last manufacturers are phasing it out.

This means more than just the passing of a now-obsolete machine. It's the death of another little bit of cool the world will never get back.

I've always felt a connection to the typewriter. As a writer, I banged out my first spectacularly melodramatic and amateurish stories back in high school on a mechanical Smith Corona that had been discarded from my father's office in favor of new electrics.

I would move up to a word processor within mere months, but I would always miss the satisfying tactile sensation of banging away at those keys amid that snare drum patter as the misaligned keys pushed through a fading ribbon to the clean sheet of rolled paper. It didn't hurt my affection for the ole qwerty beast that my hometown is Milwaukee--where, in 1866, Christopher Latham Sholes invented what would evolve into the 20th century typewriter.

When I learned that the typewriter had passed into antiquity, it struck me that its replacements--from the desktop computer and the laptop to the smartphone and the iPad--will never muster the ambiance and sense of literary history graced upon the typewriter.

You want proof? Take a second and try to picture Beat Generation poet Jack Kerouac blowing the thick purple smoke from his "J" over a bottle of bourbon and the brushed aluminum and white keys of an iMac. "On the Road" would've hit the road without its rebellious aura.

If Ian Fleming had sat down at his desk on his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica to bang out "The Spy Who Loved Me" on a Dell Netbook, James Bond would've ended up drinking Kool-Aid, stirred and not shaken. … Read more

Sony comes clean about six days after its network "intrusion" and admits that its hack attack actually led to the reveal of tens of millions of usernames, addresses, dates of birth, and maybe even passwords, security questions, and credit card numbers. So, that's a pretty bad day over at Sony. Also, Apple "comes clean" on its location data tracking, claiming that it's not happening, and even if it is happening, it's not that accurate, and even if it is that accurate, it's just so they can serve you better iAds. Wait, what?

You thought you had killed another one, techies.

With your boundless need to show how clever you are and how you can force people to change their ways of life, you were sure you had put paid to another traditional industry. But you're not as smart as all that.

Yes, Godrej & Boyce--which a news story claimed was the last known producer of typewriters in the world--declared recently that it was giving up trying to market machines that weigh more than the Taj Mahal and write slower than Thomas Pynchon.

According to India's Business Standard, the company just … Read more

Sculpture artist Jeremy Mayer sees life in old machines, deconstructing defunct typewriters and transforming their keys and cogs into life-like sculptures.

For 15 years, Mayer has been making his mechanical creations, breaking down the writing machines to their basic parts and rebuilding them into human and animal-like sculptures. The machines, Mayer says, are infused with the energy of the works that have been typed on them over the years. He says he imagines the hundreds of wedding invitations, love letters, and draft notices that might have been carefully typed out on the typewriters' keys.

During a visit to his studio … Read more

Miss the good old-fashioned manual typewriter? The USB Typewriter, a "new and groundbreaking innovation in the field of obsolescence," according to its creator, turns the old machines into retro-style keyboards that hook up to any USB-capable computer to let you type like it's 1948.

Jack Zylkin, who humorously describes himself as "a reclusive genius with 57 cats," created the peripheral with materials provided at Hive76, a maker co-op in Philadelphia where Zylkin does his tinkering. In the video below, you can see it click-clacking away attached to an iPad.

The USB Typewriter consists of a … Read more