two spaces--What about E-mail?

Subject: two spaces--What about E-mail?
From: Gwen Barnes <gwen -dot- barnes -at- MUSTANG -dot- COM>
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 22:24:49 GMT

-> > monospaced face--Courier or Elite--on a typewriter, the extra space
-> > visual cue in the _absence_ of other cues. Every letter in a monosp

-> [I thought *all* typewriter fonts were monospaced. Hmmmm.]

My favorite electric typewriter was the IBM Executive, of which I have
owned two in my lifetime. The first had a proportional font called "Mid
Century" that looked like 12 point Futura Medium, and the characters
were anywhere from 1 unit wide (lower case i) to 5 units or more (cap
M). It produced beautiful letters long before there was any such thing
as word processing, and corrections were a real bitch cause I had to
remember how wide each character was when I was backspacing.

That typewriter was beige and huge, and used carbon film ribbons stored
in bulges to each side that looked like fenders on a 1950 Chrysler. It
smelled funny and had blobs of printer's ink stuck to it,
scars from a former life in a print shop, I guess.

When it finally died, I shed a tear and went out and got another one,
this one of 1960s vintage instead of the ultra-futuristic
last-of-the-art-deco-era 1940s. It had a font that looked a bit like a
cross between Bank Gothic and ITC Quorum, don't recall the name of that
one. It saw me most of the way through college and, like its
predecessor, died and was buried at sea.

I seem to recall that the first one had two spacebars and at least one
other space key, to facilitate setting justified lines. The newer one
did the same thing with toggle switches.

I graduated to a real computer after that, but it just isn't the same.
Doing term papers on an L300 was a great novelty back then <grin>

Cheers, @DISCLAIMER@
Gwen gwen -dot- barnes -at- mustang -dot- com
MSI * Connecting the world 805-873-2500


Previous by Author: Re: Re. Two spaces vs. one after periods
Next by Author: Re: Explaining what we do
Previous by Thread: two spaces--What about E-mail?
Next by Thread: Textbook fodder


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:


Sponsored Ads