Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

Oi! oi! oi!

Why typewriters beat computers, from the BBC.

Apparently, Brother International Corp sold an incredible 12,000 typewriters in Great Britain last year. Those Brits, so much more punk than us Canucks.

… And the whole crazy British punk scene sure owed a lot to typewriter tech for its aesthetic. Typical example: Jon Savage’s London’s Outrage. (Oddly, my recall of the ultimate zine from that era, Snffin’ Glue, was that it had a very cheap grungy typewriter font look to it as well, but in fact the headlines on the covers were mostly hand drawn. Ahhh if only I could have experienced this stuff first hand, but I digress…)

Anyhow, that BBC piece has a great quote from pulp master Frederick Forsyth, who still writes on a typewriter:

… after 50 years and a dozen novels including The Day of the Jackal, why change now, he asks.

“I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again. And have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter? It is very secure.”

Take that, cloud computing Web 2.0 types!