#70s technology

The Steve Grohe Studio, 1978

I had promised to talk more about the technology I grew up around which Ichigo also would have, sooooo

Yeah, computers take a look at me and die, so this is a portable electric typewriter.

The close-up, you can see it’s out of ink. The ink is on that ribbon and the keys hammer a blot of ink the shape of a letter onto the paper.

It folds up in the case, it’s probably about 10kg, but you can schlep it around.

The one I have is an English one.

Japanese keyboards had to have 2100 kanji, 2 52 letter alphabets, then all the punctuation and stuff.

You had the trays to select the letter, those disappeared on some newer ones to be replaced by really small selection spaces, but I’ll explain the older model in my house growing up.

So, yeah, at least two huge trays of letters. You had one crank to select the block, then the other you pushed to activate the hammer that would hit the ribbon and type the letter you selected onto the paper.

Now, the English one shown here is pretty damn seventies, but computers weren’t really everywhere until the mid 90s, so I have history with both Japanese and English typewriters, and Ichigo would likely know his way around a Japanese one.

Computers began in the home as a “weird nerd” thing in the 70s with hobbyist kits. They really proliferated in the late 90s, though. Before that, they weren’t the most user friendly.

Even then, poorer people didn’t have them. I got my first one in 2007. Made of scrap parts. (I know everyone has their own laptop now, but anyone remember the shared home desktop?)