Yes,,,,if you want, you can still buy a typewriter.

[hunter]

15. My mom gave both my sister and me electric typewriters when we started college.

She'd made us all take typing in middle school. This was before computers. The skill served us well later on.

My mom's a master typist, she was probably among the fastest in the U.S. for a time She could transcribe tapes without pausing while editing along the way. Sometimes she'd hear us struggling to finish papers late at night in high school, tap.tap.tap...tap, and it would irritate her so much she'd get out of bed, shove us aside, and BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAP she'd finish typing the paper in two minutes. But it would cost us in peace of mind, she wouldn't be happy about it.

My original term papers were always cut-and-paste monstrosities. The magic thing about these typewriters was that they had a white ribbon erase feature so you didn't have to use liquid paper. I replaced that white ribbon much more frequently than the regular black ribbon. But my papers still looked like crap so I'd get them copied at Kinko's and hand in the copies. Professors and TA's sometimes balked at that until they saw what my originals looked like, or worse, suffered my handwriting. No one ever doubted I'd written the papers, my "I don't give a shit about grammar, I'm just hammering the words out" writing voice was unusual.

Then I discovered vi. It was a damned miracle, writing papers using a computer, and there was a spell checker too.

Soon enough I had my own computer, an Atari 800 (my favorite machine ever) and I traded some work for a nice Epson dot matrix printer. It completely changed my life. I even wrote a few printer drivers to make the printer do things the standard printer drivers couldn't do; simple math formulas and such. But the typewriter was still essential for filling out paper forms, especially since my handwriting was so awful.

When my kids were small they were more fascinated by the typewriter than they were my computers, learning how to change the paper and everything.

I gave the typewriter away years ago.

Even in grade school my kids were using computers to write book reports and papers.