On Sat, July 21, 2012 3:07 pm, John Howell wrote:
> The typewriter keyboard (at least the American
> ones on which I learned to type in about 1950)
> lacked a LOT of characters that were common in
> typesetting, including italics, boldface, and
> almost all diacritical marks.  The number "1" was
> typed as a lower-case "L," and the "zero" was an
> upper-case "O."  Italics were indicated by
> underscoring.  And trying to imitate boldface was
> a real kludge.

I learned at a place called Drake School of Business in 1963. Our keyboards
were blank.

There were such great tricks for some things -- full-justified or
right-justified typing was the real challenge, because one business style used
it for return addresses.

As for boldface, there was one typewriter (I forget the brand) which had a
horizontal offset spacer on the platen to allow the same characters to be
typed over the others with just a little shift, creating a bolder character.

If you got a classy typewriter, it had "1" key. :)

And later, I used an IBM Selectric Composer in my graphics job at the NJ State
Museum. You typed everything twice -- once so the machine could calculate the
space needed, and a second time after using a special tab key to move across
the (extra-wide) page.

Never mind. I still have a manual typewriter, but I'll never go back to those
days unless we get an apocalypse.

Dennis





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