It didn’t require a lot of force, but it did require a lot of travel. You also needed to remember to use only one key at a time, or else the mechanism would jam.
I was using it in the 70s and 80s. It was given to my father by his father when he went to UW Madison in 1950. It had been used at his father’s law office for 20 years at that point. He had a long-time legal secretary who did all the typing. Apparently she could set the thing on fire with the speed of her typing. The most-used keys were worn smooth like river stones and had groves worn into them by her fingernails.
I never met her, or my grandfather really, but I did know the grooves she left in the typewriter.
Mom’s old S-Cs did that, the hammers would jam. The word processor thing she upgraded to in the 80s was more like the Selectrics, but I never opened it up enough to see how the mechanism worked. She would use it in the mode that would allow word processing of each line. When she pressed Enter it would blast the whole line in a couple seconds while she kept typing.
The big trend that stands out is, languages associated with Web stuff really explode and stay dominant. If you looked at specific industries or types of applications the chart would be very different.
It’s easy to spot the moment when the Defense Department gave up on Ada as the official language to use for their projects. When I was in college there were some contracts that wrote Ada wrappers for their C code and got away with it.
I’m surprised C held out above C++ for so long though. I feel like even back in my college days there was a sense C was going to be quickly replaced. C++ has been the main language I’ve used for the past 25 years or so. (Where I work now also has some C#, FORTRAN legacy code that we want to port to C++, and a little Visual Basic).
Speaking of nostalgia… Crashproof was one of my characters in a short-lived burst of playing Anarchy Online (which apparently hasn’t been shut down yet, wow). About the time that the movie “Death Proof” came out. Which I didn’t actually see…
Turbo Pascal was my first ‘real’ language (other than BASICs), and the one that I learned structured programming and OOP on. It’ll always hold a special spot in my memory.
Delphi was really awesome, but its sky-high price tag was not something hobbyists like me could buy into. By the time I got into a career it was long out of favor, due primarily to mismanagement. It certainly couldn’t compete with the Cambrian explosion of free and open-source languages and development tools that came with the web. It still exists, but is largely forgotten except for those of us who saw it back then.
I also tried C++ (along with Borland OWL), which was affordable, and it was way more complicated and difficult. But it took an entirely different path than Pascal/Delphi, and didn’t fall prey to the management problems.
Sometimes I wonder what things would be like if Pascal and Forth had ‘rode the wave’ and become the dominant modern languages, picking up bits from others along the way and becoming multi-paradigm as most languages have now. I think software would be very different.
The emulator won best in show, but that was in 2006. Things have changed a bit and [Oscar] has updated the code so that you can continue to try it if you want to give yourself a headache reading code. The portability isn’t a CPU issue — modern CPUs will happily run code from 2006. The problem is the compiler and operating system. Compilers are much stricter these days, and Linux needs a little extra coaxing to give access to the input stream the way the faux computer needs it.
