QWERTY

I can’t type in the morning, arthritis or delirium, I don’t know. I can’t read, either, since the font size that comes up as “normal” in Microsoft Word is so tiny that it may as well be invisible.

I have to go back and adjust it to twelve, or even fourteen pitch. I know the day is coming when I will have the type so large that single words will take up the whole page. It is a comfort to know that so long as I have my faculties, there will be words large enough for me to read.

But of course, we will probably have blown way past that. The way I type now is so different than the way I learned. The faithful Smith-Corona that I had in college was a straight-forward contraption. Sleek, for the time, and a body of that burnt-orange color we equated with the future. It was a modernistic thing. I had to find an electrical outlet in the Fraternity to plug it in. The Chi Phi House was a grand old pile of disintegrating stone, and outlets were hard to come by.

I recall doing my papers on a club table dragged over to a corner of the huge institutional kitchen in the basement, and if I looked at the files jumbled in my closet I think I could find one of them, grade scrawled on the cover page of brittle onion-skin paper.

There were strike-overs, and white-outs, and toward the end you can see fatigue and errors creep in. The typing was the hard part of the writing, and a dictionary was an essential thing. I recall the slow deliberate pace with which I hit the keys, thinking with each letter.

The orange typewriter made it from college through two deployments to the Gulf. It finally died when I was in Korea . I was sitting in the hooch over on South Post at Yongsan Garrison, where most of the living quarters were located, and the golf course and the United Nations Club. We are giving the Garrison back to the Koreans this year or next, and leaving Seoul after more than fifty years.

I used to write about going to the bunker on North Post that was dug deep under the UN Command HQ. We monitored North Korean military activity there, behind the thick walls and sentries. I remember whistling loudly in the darkness, and scuffing my feet so I would not startle one of the little Ghurka guards and be cut with that enormous curved knife they carry. I know it was largely ceremonial, and he probably would have shot me first, but you can’t be too careful when you are waiting for an invasion.

Miss Kim, the hooch’s Mama-san, approved of the typewriter on the desk in my room. She thought I was productive.

One of the letter rods- probably the one with the “E” on it had been migrating slowly off the orderly line of its fellows. One night, pounding on the keyboard about some outrage of the ROK military government, the rod gave it up altogether, shooting out of the machine like a valve-lifter on a blown NASCAR engine, rattling against the window screen with the 9mm bullet hole in it.

I tri d to continu , l aving whit spac s wh r th “ “s should hav gon , but it didn’t mak much s ns .

Miss Kim was hit by a bus not long after the incident, and died. This may be the first time I have written of it, since there is a hole in my records that lasted until I scraped enough won- the local currency- together to buy a refurbished electric machine downtown. That one didn’t last long, either, since I type with great vigor, a condition encouraged by the long-stroke of the Smith-Corona keys.

Fourteen months into my one-year tour with the UN, I got orders to Hawaii .

There the Navy had squadrons of IBM Selectric typewriters, the Cadillac of writing machines. My Mother bought me a competitor’s model, a Royal, and I kept it for years, since there were still forms that needed to be filled out and only an actual typewriter would do to make them neat and look official.

It was near the palm trees that I felt the world change in 1981. We still operated the teletype machines to punch paper tapes that were fed into machines to transmit messages. It was considered a fine art to “butterfly” a long spool of tape on your outstretched fingers, so that the paper would not kink and jam in the machine.

Across the room, analysts hunched over Wang word-processors that produced green letters on a little screen when you typed. These were networked together and hooked up to a thing called a Streamliner, that sent the words out as messages, no paper tapes required.

But unlike the Apples and PC’s of today, the operating system was the same for both kinds of Selectric. They featured carbon-plastic ribbons in cassettes, and rolls of plastic white-out tape on orange spools; hitting the backspace would fill the typos with white, precisely, and allow you to begin again.

The type-ball replaced the individual hammers. It was mounted on a central spindle, with a locking tab on the top. It could fly away if not secured properly, and one once landed in my coffee cup. Working as intended, the ball danced with the command of the keys, striking the paper like a pecking bird, whirling to change aspect with each character.

At the very end of the line, IBM introduced a machine that incorporated a computing feature that saved a line of type and presented it on a little window, so you could see the typos and correct them before you printed it.

It was an excellent improvement to the buggy whip. They are all gone now. Most official forms can be typed on-line, and I no longer care if some of them look professional or not. I have discovered that I cannot write by hand very well, that skill having atrophied away.

I took the Royal to the Good Will last year. It was too big, and too heavy, and I needed the tax write off.

It is curious that the keyboard is still the same on my laptop. The one we use today is called the “QWERTY” by those who care about such things, and is the arrangement of the letters on the first line of keys below the numbers. It is awkward, inefficient and confusing, and is intended to be so. Now that it no longer matters, my fingers fly over them and Microsoft highlights my lines with seas of blood-red corrections.

Some say the placement of the keys was made to intentionally slow the keystrokes, so as to de-conflict the arc of the flying hammers of the first “Type-Writer,” manufactured in 1872. Inventor C. L. Sholes is responsible for it, improving on the original prototype he saw three years after the end of the Civil War.

In the original machine, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. Sholes did one of the first human-factors studies of man-machine interface. He used a survey of letter-pair frequency prepared by the brother of his financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard layout was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the type hammers inside the machine to the keys on the outside.

Sholes went to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have the machines mass-produced. No one noted how stupid the layout was, since the whole business of operating a Type Writer was awkward anyway.

I don’t know if the “E” hammer flew off of the Remingtons, but between the hand guns and typewriters manufactured by the company thereafter, humankind has benefited immensely.

Now I just have to go back up the page and fix all the red highlights. The interesting thing, in my mind, is that the word processor in our heads can still process the typos. I had to delete about ten spam e-mails from the queue this morning, since the pornographers have found out another way to beat the computer filters.

A printable one, and most are not, looks like this: “RE: Cute Avril Lavigne fersh pron ptohos” It is a clever way to invite you to look at dirty pictures. Regardless of the spelling, the human brain puts it back together just fine. A computer can’t do that, at least right now.

I have to sigh when I think that I pioneered the art in Korea years ago. Intentional misspelling is like QWERTY, born of necessity.

I could have been on the leading edge of something. I just didn’t know what I had.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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