Hacker News Reader

Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

> ... and typewriters still aren't obsolete!

I guess I'm living in a particular professional niche but I haven't seen a typewriter in ages. Let alone seen anyone using one.

View on HN

Last time I saw one (working and in real life, rather than TV or a museum) was the late 80s or early 90s. And even then, it was in a second-hand charity sale.

Typewriters typically are not connected to the internet. I.e. nobody can hack them, remotely sabotage them, or hoover up every word you type. It's not completely outside the realm of possibility that we'll come to appreciate those features again within our lifetimes.

Neither is a computer without a network connection.

Fortunately, espionage wasn't invented until after the typewriter's obsolescence - certainly no one has ever used a typewriter in the pursuit of espionage before! - and intelligence agencies the world over thus would be forced to respond from a standing start.

Huh? It was fairly common for typewriter ribbons to be destroyed where confidential information was typed, as it was possible to acquire previously typed characters.

Obviously. But how obviously to someone who assumes anything without an Internet connection is constitutionally unsurveillable thereby? How does it occur to you to destroy a ribbon, or consider all the other methods by which a sufficiently motivated adversary will defeat your toy air gap, if you believe your air gap isn't a toy?

Of course we are deep into the realm of movie plots already, where we've fantasized a superstate-or superhuman-level adversary still somehow capable of being defeated by "going crude." But if that's where we're going to hang out, why half-ass it?

I realize that your /s key is broken, but ...

... you would be shocked by how much could be surveilled back then. Pretty much any voice communicated were sent in the clear. It didn't much matter whether it was sent over wire or over the air. Snail mail was virtually always sent as clear text. Even digital communications were rarely encrypted. Even ignoring the legality of it, few people had the creativity to envision a world of secure communications or wanted to expend their (limited) computing power on it. There were, of course, exceptions like the military.

Who's being sarcastic? My point is precisely that a typewriter is not a magic bullet, and I lived back then; I assure you I am very well aware.

I really do grow frightened of people's reading comprehension on the internet, having observed a qualitative decline especially in the last twelve months. Granted, this seems more due to indolence than actual impairment, thus far at least, but atrophy must eventually tell.

During the Cold War, Russians bugged typewriters to broadcast what was being typed: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/how-s...

The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.

It's not uncommon for used typewriters on ebay to include the old ribbon, along with the last fifty thousand characters the previous owner typed...

Certainly that would be the case with film ribbons, but I don't see how typed character history could be obtained from a cloth/cotton ribbon, especially since they were as I recall reversible (would spool one dirction, then the other when reaching the end), meaning the previous typing would be overwritten multiple times.

I’ve seen a lot of “distraction-free” writing apps up to even e-ink screens glued to mechanical keyboards. There’s still plenty of typewriters out there—they’re just paper-free now.

That’s not a typewriter no matter how much you’d want to make that connection.

I have not seen a physical fax machine in over a decade; haven’t sent a fax in at least 4 years.

Yet they are still around and not obsolete.

Go to a doctor's office.

They live there.

What then should we call technologies that have multiple significantly lower cost, more versatile, more ubiquitous, and more interoperable alternatives available?

They're still around and obsolete. They continue to exist solely due to regulatory capture in the healthcare industry.

My local hospital system was bought by one of the big city systems. I think quite a few of the older docs basically quit because of dealing with the newer electronic health records system. The younger docs seem OK with it. Never seen anyone use a typewriter.

As a patient much better. No more faxing lab work to the lab and it's back in hours.

It's because faxed signatures have legal recognition and nothing electronic does.

That's not true, digital signatures have been legally valid since 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_in_Globa...

Yep, the last HP LaserJet Color printer I bought came with fax. I must admit, I kind of wondered why.

So they could charge you more money for the increase in “value” embodied in the product. (sarc)

Possibly. But I really like their more up-market color laser printers. They have always worked flawlessly for me. Their inkjets (and everyone else's inkjets) on the other hand ...

I'd call them obsolescent, not obsolete.

Plenty of businesses and governments in the USA still only accept documents via fax. So fax machines and fax services will continue to exist just to service them. I don't think there's a single business that requires you to hand in typewritten documents.

They are but they aren't.

Excepting niche cases (like filling out carbons in triplicate at car dealerships and such) typewriters are pretty anachronistic. It is, however, amusing that over the past decade as things have digitized fewer people seem to own printers. Without a printer a computer fails at the simple task that a typewriter is inherently designed for - putting words to paper. Anecdotally <50% of my friends have a printer in their home... I wonder how that compares to typewriter ownership 50 years ago?

Regardless it's pretty clear that the author of the site is a big typewriter fan hence their statement. I find it contrived, but hey, it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round.

Obsolete doesn't mean useless. Typewriters are obsolete! I use a lot of things that are obsolete, but that doesn't make them not obsolete.

Indeed I use my printer once every two months or so, as a very rough estimate. And then it’s usually for myself rather than for someone or something else.

For example I sometimes (not always) like printing out papers to read them “offline”, or diagrams when I want to take notes on them.

I don’t miss dealing with paper because I had to.

Ownership of printers is so low because the usefulness of putting words to paper is correspondingly low these days, though, because so many things are online or at least digital. 20-30 years ago though printers were far more common than typewriters before them.

I am going to guess that most fax machines are not dedicated machines but a part of combination of printer scanner fax. It wouldn’t be obvious

Reply on news.ycombinator.com