Typewriters around the world: machines, practices, cultures with Thomas S. Mullaney
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A series of presentations on typewriters, typewriting, and related communities of practice. Each presentation in the series offers a glimpse of ongoing critical engagement with everyday technologies for different writing systems around the world.
THOMAS S. MULLANEY (Stanford University) A typewriter with no keys: the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective The transition from movable type to typewriting, and then from typewriting to computing, was experienced in dramatically different ways depending on the language in question. For English, the transition from letterpress to typewriting was marked by a technological schism. With the introduction of the keyboard, and with metal typefaces being moved largely out of sight, and into the chassis of the machine, typewriting bore little resemblance to the act of movable type composition. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was a relatively seamless one for English speakers. Not only did the keyboard stay the same, but so did the logic of textual production: to produce the letter ‘X’ on an IBM PC monitor, one depressed the letter ‘X’ on the keyboard – just like one did in the age of Remington. What you type is what you get. These same transitions were completely different in the context of Chinese. Chinese typewriters continued to feature metal character slugs, with the exact same dimensions as those found in Chinese movable type. There was no keyboard on a Chinese typewriter, moreover, with typists looking directly at a tray bed of approximately 2500 metallic slugs, each a Chinese character or symbol in mirror image. For Chinese, that is to say, the letterpress-typewriting transition was marked by continuity, so much so that some referred to Chinese typewriters as ‘tabletop printing presses’. The transition from typewriting to computing, by contrast, was one of rupture for Chinese. Not only did Chinese computing introduce the mechanism of the keyboard for the first time, but it introduced an entirely new logic of textual production: input, where what you type is never what you get. In this talk, Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney will provide an overview of the letterpress-typewriter-computer transition in global, comparative perspective.
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