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Tom Hanks on Typewriters

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Re: Tom Hanks on Typewriters

#91
post #89

At a technical conference a few years back, I decided to give my presentation using hand written viewfoils on an overhead projector. The conference venue had to really dig to find a working projector :-) For years afterwards, people would come up to me and remark on how that presentation stuck in their memory! (I still have a mechanical typewriter. Maybe I won't throw it away after all.)

A friend of mine fell when going on stage for a conference. He broke his nose and there were lots of blood and an ambulance involved. Everybody remembers it. It's great that you use that technique if it is going to make your presentation clearer, if using the projector really helped your audience to get whatever you were presenting better. If that was the case, congratulations for an original idea. But if they only r…

I had the sense to talk to the conference people a couple weeks in advance about the projector, and it was waiting in the conference room on schedule. So that wasn't a problem.

It didn't affect the content of the presentation at all.

The only issue was one of perception - I was talking about new technology, and was presenting using old technology. It wasn't congruent, and didn't really fit, although it was fun. Hence it was a one-off thing. I didn't do it again.

I doubt today one could even find a viewfoil projector, and the audio-visual staff would be annoyed because it won't interface to their recording system. Annoying the AV staff is never a good idea.

Re: Tom Hanks on Typewriters

#92
post #72
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who restores older Teletype machines, I get to type on a real mechanical keyboard. It's a strange experience at first. When you press a key, it locks down for 200ms while the mechanism cycles. During this period, no other key can be pressed; the other keys are physically blocked. You can't press two keys at once; that, too, is mechanically interlocked. Efficient typing on these machines requires typing at…

> Western Union expected their Teletype operators to be able to type "blind", with no display or printer to see what they were typing. My aunt taught typing at a girls' high school in the '80s. She was amazingly fast - she bought a typewriter with a memory, and I recall her being finished with a typewritten letter when the page was only one-third of the way through 'printing'. Had to wait for it to finish each time b…

I'm curious about this anecdote. PCs, even into the early 90s, had a keyboard buffer that was only a few dozen characters long, at most. I know because I'd frequently hit it and had learned to stop when I heard the first beep and pick right up where I left off without losing a character once it had time to finish flushing. I don't know of any system where you could have typed enough in advance that you'd have to sit long enough for this conversation to transpire.

That said, maybe this could be the case if it was a dumb terminal connected to a unix server and it was buffering in the network stack?

Re: Tom Hanks on Typewriters

#93
post #39

I'm very interested in this phenomenon where people seem to idolize certain outdated, analog technology. It seems to be some reaction against, or coping mechanism for, the increasingly digital world. I have a lot of fuzzy thoughts on it, and I'd like to read a book or an article that unpacks the idea more thoroughly.

As a musician, I've recently started working with analog synthesizers. Digital synths tend to be very alienating devices, at least for me - you don't really program them, you just select a preset that sounds kind of like what you want. Software synths even more so. Then I picked up an Arturia Microbrute, and the visceral thrill of twisting knobs to get the sounds really turned me on! There are no presets. Want to rep…

Sound engineers have long recognized the necessity of keeping analog-style physical controls around, even when they are just inputs to a computer.

Nobody who can help it is going to mix with a keyboard and mouse. Faders and knobs (excuse me, "encoders") rule the day.

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