1/31/2024 0 Comments Ommwriter runs slow![]() ![]() ![]() And yet, it seemed wonderful at the time, even if it was only kept as a curiosity :-) Even a non-typist could beat it, even on a bad day. And imagine how unforgiving it was to going to fast, to slow, or not moving accurately down to the next line. Now lay it flat and there's a "puck" you slide along the retaining bar across the page, reading a single line of text from a limited number of "readable" typefaces and point size, plugged into a serial port and it constantly makes mistakes, even after lots of "training". Imagine a document copy-holder with the flappy bar across it. It was a device called OmniRead or OmniReader or some such which doesn't show up on Google except as much more recent devices so either they survived, got bought out or someone picked over the bones and bought the name. My first "play" with OCR was when CP/M was still king and MS-DOS was starting to make inroads. Now I see they've gone back to the double decker. Boring bit of history is it was always an E1 double decker route, then it got changed to E8, tiny, single decker minibus style. So I'd walk down to the Wang building as everyone else was too lazy to and have an empty bus stop so I could get the bus before the others :) over the years I realised, despite it being a 3.3 mile walk home, it was sometimes quicker to just walk home than wait for the bus. As none of us queued properly (well I did), the drivers would frequently just skip our stop. This is because you'd get one kid stand at the end of the road shout "BUS" and everyone would surge down the road trying to pile on the bus. I'd go to the bus stop opposite despite there being a bus stop at the end of our school road. There was a massive Wang in school in the late 80s, early 90s. And my handwriting is now rubbish, even though I still use a fountain pen. ![]() I'm still a four finger typist - never really got the hang of it, even after 60 years. As well as "reveal codes" to sort out formatting screw ups - I really miss that feature in modern word processors. So we would all learn to type and productivity would soar (possibly because there was no longer any excuse to go into the typing pool in person and chat up the gorgeous one who sat next to the window - but I could be wrong about that) So I failed to get to 60 wpm, or even 6 on a good day, but we had all made PROGRESS! Or progress of a sort when spellcheckers came along with Word Perfect, and we did not have to spend hours making corrections. ![]() And you still had to keep changing the ribbon. letter-headed bond, but that's another moan for another day. I'd love to know who it was who forgot that typists could spell, and decided that dot matrix output on perforated fan fold paper was a satisfactory alternative to a crisp IBM golf-ball typewriter on 100 gsm. And incredibly noisy dot matrix printers. IBM twin floppy disc jobs - with Word Perfect. Back in the day we had to write (as in handwriting, on paper, with a fountain pen (yes!) for the typing pool to copy onto the company letterhead) My handwriting was really quite good then, cos lots of practice, with the benefit that the typists would always choose to copy the most legible offerings first. ![]()
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