My adventures in print... Part 2

Recently I've been thinking a lot about my adventures in print over the years.  When I was a child, I remember making little books from a sheet of paper, folded in 4, then cut to produce small 4 page booklets. I wrote little stories, some invented, some about my pets, or things I'd been doing.  They were often illustrated with crude colour pencil drawings...... art was never my forte.

At some point I was given an old Remington typewriter, which had belonged to an uncle or aunt. It was ancient and clunky, but I spent hours hunched over it, laboriously clacking out pages of closely typed print.... stories, poems, lists.  I loved it, although I can see now that the incessant noise of me bashing away at the keys must have made everyone in the house long to through it out the window.

In my early 20s I graduated to an electric typewriter. After school and before college I had taken a shorthand and typing class... apart from learning to drive, learning to touch type has been the life skill I use most.  After the initial slog of fjfjfjfj ghghghgh etc and feeling I'd never master it, something clicked and I was able to type without looking at the keys.  It's like a kind of magic and it never ceases to please me.  I can't remember a solitary thing about the shorthand but the typing has stayed with me and I use it every day. 

My electric typewriter was a revelation. No more bruised fingertips or having to jooosh the carriage across at the end of every line.  One button press and the carriage purred smoothly across the machine.  

It had a back space button! AND, joy of joys, an autocorrect function!  This comprised a little strip of Tippex along the bottom of the ink ribbon, which could be used to overtype errors.  I was in heaven.  It was on that machine that I produced my first newsletters, which I duly sent off to the photocopy shop.

A few years later, I was a founder member of Kent Miniaturists, and responsible for all the printed material... newsletters, programmes, workshop instructions etc. Although I still used my trusty typewriter, having original documents photocopied was expensive, so I bought an ancient Gestetner duplicating machine from the Parish Council and installed it in an old outbuilding.

It was a behemoth.... about the size of a washing machine. It was also temperamental, and I often emerged from a duplicating session spattered with ink and covered in cobwebs.

The process was arcane and messy.  First I had to 'cut the stencil'.... text with my electric typewriter and any drawings/diagrams using a ballpoint stylus tool.  I still have that tool and use it every day in my doll making..... I'd be lost without it!

If I made a mistake I'd have to use a gloopy pink liquid to seal the holes in the stencil.  Actually creating a copy involved loading the stencil onto a drum, having first ensured that the ink reservoir was full.  The ink was like tar, and in the chill of the outbuilding it was always too thick and viscous.  Then I'd turn the handle and the first sheet of paper would feed though the slot coming into contact with the stencil over the inked drum.  The results were often patchy and I'd have to manually spread the ink over the drum and keep trying until an acceptable result was achieved.  I wasted a LOT of paper.

For a multi-page newsletter I had to change the stencils for each page, inevitably a messy procedure.  Also the ink had to dry on the page, otherwise it would smudge, which took time, so double sided printing was an exercise in patience.

My machine was very similar to this one.....

But.... I LOVED IT!  

Fast forward to 1985 and the advent of the first Word Processor.  I bought an Amstrad PCW 8256 and suddenly felt that I was at the cutting edge of printing technology.  

It had a green screen monitor, separate keyboard,  a dot matrix printer and used floppy discs.  It had four different fonts.

FOUR!!!

It was basically a glorified typewriter, but I was once again smitten.  OK so it only produced text, and the printed result was quite clunky, with the individual dots which made up each character often clearly visible, but it made producing repeat pages of text much simpler, cleaner and cheaper. I used my trusty word processor for years, until in the 1990s I finally made the leap to a PC with an inkjet printer.  

Looking back, it's amazing how far technology has come in the past 50 years.  I've gone from pencil and paper to desktop publishing.... it's difficult to imagine a similar leap in the next half century, although perhaps in the future words and images will transfer directly into the brain via an organic implant.  Or maybe there will be holographic printers, which will create 3D animated images from text.  Or maybe the written/spoken word will be obsolete and people will communicate via mind merge telepathy. Who knows?