- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 12
-
Sparkle (0)
Three of us are working at my daughter’s house on three computers, two of us in the same room and one of us in the designated office. We are wired and wireless. We are working on different projects for different companies at the same time. One of us is in her pajamas.
Technology makes this possible…got to love it. I remember a time, it doesn’t seem so long ago, when this couldn’t have happened. One of the good things about the pre-computer technology days was that, if you went on vacation, it was truly a vacation. You were either at home or at the office, not both. But, I’m no backward gazer lamenting the times that used to be.. The good thing about the wired word is that we can and do work according to our energy, wherever we like and can combine a visit to family while still meeting client needs and work obligations. (In the freelance world that I work in, you got to do the work when it comes.)
A flash from the past popped into my mind for some reason as we were all working. If you remember this machine – you are middle-aged or older or had somebody around you who was.
Before there were personal computers, faxes and copiers, during the time of carbon paper, there came a machine that changed everything for those of us in the clerical pool and secretarial profession.
It was the IBM Selectric typewriter and it was the best, da bomb, the bomb-diggity. (I owned the Selectric II and Selectric III models).
Introduced in 1961, it revolutionized typing because it used a golf ball-shaped typing element rather than type bar or moveable carriage and had a self-correction feature. All you had to do was hit it and back-space, then retype the word. No need for sheets of correction paper or fumy and messy correction fluid. It was sleek and looked different than the typewriters that preceded it. It came in a variety of cutting-edge colors. It was also quite expensive. My first husband bought me one for my birthday where it went to a place of honor in the small basement-office he built-out, where I worked on my personal writing and my college papers (which had to be mailed to the adult degree program at Goddard College where I completed my undergraduate degree). If you want to see a photo of various selectric tupewriters, check out The Dead Media Project.
The photocopier was another revolutionary invention especially for those of us who worked in offices. It was actually invented in 1938 by a guy named Chester F. Carlson, and called xereography, but took 21 years to come to the public. For the longest time I called copying “Xeroxing” after the Xerox Company that brought it to the masses. The photocopier pretty much ended the use of carbon paper documents except for certain legal and government organizations that refused to join this revolution. (They held out for years.)
One of the measures of the passage of time in your life is when you talk about “what you used to do,” the machines you “used to use,” and try to imagine what’s coming next. We all know that something else is coming that we can’t fathom yet or that only exist in the realm of someone’s fertile imagination.
Ungeek It says that “we are all smarter than machines” and writes useful and sometimes funny posts about such things as full-body airport X-ray scanners, “Hacking the Body,”. And a Virgual Convetion.
Adrianna Linares bills her blog, I Heart Tech as “technology tips and advice for a Lawyer’s Life and Business.” I am not nor have I ever been a lawyer, but I find her posts quite useful. Recent entries have included “Word’s Track Changes…so pretty & smart yet so dangerous.” Having had a recent close encounter with the track changes feature, it resonated with me.
BlogHer’s own Technology contributing editor, Virginia DeBolt, writes about tech and green matters in was that are always illuminating. Even when I don’t follow her entreaties to try new devices, I do pass them along to others and put them in my “to do/to pursue/to check out sooner than later file.”
I look in amazement and delight at my two-year-old granddaughter who knows how to find the buttons to turn on the digital camera (and take photos even if they
