Want a Fast Computer 1340

CBFalconer

I remember the day, I think it was in fourth grade which would have made it about 1957, when we were promoted from pencils to real ink pens. By this I mean those individual nibs where you had a bottle of ink on the desk and had to dip every word or two. Now of course, fountain pens were available, but that was the lazy man's way out and we were going to learn the "proper technique" for writing with ink first. Once we mastered this, we were allowed to progress to fountain pens. I recall, however, and IIRC they had just been introduced, that one could buy cartridge ink pens. They looked like fountain pens but instead of filling them from an inkwell, when they ran out of ink you would replace a circular plastic ink filled cylinder with a new full one. The cylinders were about an inch and a half long and maybe about 1-4 inch in diameter but I haven't seen one in decades and don't know if they're still available. That's the way I went, anyway. I don't recall any problems with leaking which was a problem with cheap fountain pens. In college, I recall some special fine line kind of pen, IIRC the name was something like "rapidograph" but it would frequently clog. I'm not sure when I transitioned to ball points but I would guess early in the 60's, and never looked back. Everything gets old. I was demonstrating land line telegraphy (speaking of old) at a museum last summer and we had an old underwood typewriter in the corner, one of those big black open frame office machines. One of the visitors was a father and daughter couple, the daughter probably about 8 to 10. He pointed out the typewriter to her and when she questioned what it was, told her it was sort of like the computer at home. I almost cried.....

Chris AN GETTO$;DUMP;RUN,ALGOL,TAPE $$