The Old Match on the Typewriter Trick

Back when I was a kid, we didn't have all these snazzy electronic gizmos.

I don't think of myself as "middle aged" or "old" - cripes, I am a member of Generation X for the love of Pete. Okay, so I was born in the earlier half of the cohort - meaning that I'm among the older Gen Xers, but 1) not the oldest and 2) OH BY THE WAY, I'm not old...not even falling under an "Age Discrimination in Employment Act" (ADEA) protected class (those 40 and over). In other words, I'm planning to be around for a while - I've got a lot more working to do in my life.

I do, however, remember taking "Typing" class...on, you know, typewriters. And not even those funky ones that would do all kinds of correcting for you - I mean something like THIS ONE. Those big old 1960's style Selectrics. Oh yeah, man. The smell of the typewriter ribbons, the hum of the motors, and the clicking of the keys and/or type balls. MAN, that was good stuff.

I remember one guy set about setting them on fire with those "strike anywhere" matches - set it up so when one of the keys struck paper, it would set off the match. Ah, good times...good times.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Old. I think I had a Turbo BASIC class in high school, but for the most part we're talking "typing," not "keyboarding," not "word Processing." TYPING. On typewriters.

And yes, there were modems...although there wasn't anything like AOL - Prodigy had been formed while I was in high school, but it was nothing like AOL would become in the late 1990's. As an aside, I remember the Sears store near where I grew up advertising this service and me wondering "what the hell is that" and "why would anyone want that?" I remember my buddy Lanny, whose parents had the only personal computer I had ever seen up to that point would have me over and we would be up almost the entire night playing these silly BBS games - "You have entered a cave." > Look. "You see writing on a wall." > Read. And so on. You'd have to call the BBS, then put the phone handset onto the modem.