At RIT, for many years, I had an old Royal typewriter in my office. Believe it or not, there were students who asked what it was. Over time they gave me an eraser with "Command X" on it and a bottle of Wite-Out with "Command Z" on it and a pocket dictionary that said "Spellchecker."

In 1957 my parents gave me a Royal portable typewriter. It was white and had a smell of ink from the ribbon and lubricating oil from the key bars that stayed with it for years. The deal was made that I had to improve my handwriting in the year before. My parents feared that I would somehow forget how to write once I started typing. As a self-taught typist I still type with two fingers — actually one and a half fingers — and have to look at the keys.

You erased an error with one of those round red erasers with a little brush on the end. Every few years you cleaned the eraser droppings out from between the type bars. Later they had long thin gray erasers but the round red ones were a required peripheral. If you wanted a copy there was a miracle product called carbon paper. If you used it and made a mistake, you had twice the erasing to do. I once had a job that required 10 copies and you better believe that I was a careful typist. The last carbon copy was a pale ghost of gray. You tried not to make too many mistakes. Fortunately, the mechanical nature of the system required some effort to depress the key. This was a de facto method for slowing you down. For important correspondence, typists did encounter what was called "end of page pressure"— the stress of realizing that an error at the beginning could be fixed by starting over again without much investment in the document, but an error near the end required starting over and redoing a lot more. Of course, the last line would be going downhill as the paper shifted in the platen.