Ah the IBM Selectric. Probably the best typewriter ever made. Some 20 yrs ago I took a college course in office machine repair and we had to strip the IBM Selectric down and put it back together in a working order. Not an easy thing to do since each part worked with the others around it so that a mistake in a setting could throw a lot of things off. No doubt some errors do creep in due to the person who is supposed to scan it for typo's isn't paying proper attention to what he/she is doing, but I have a feeling that as long as humans write there will also still be some typo's that creep in.
I remember a couple that the (former) editor of a paper caught once (they were mentioned when he was being roasted). One said, "hens for sale, all dressed and ready for the rooster." It was supposed to read roaster instead of rooster. lol. The other was a missing comma in an ad to sell a car. Part of the ad advertised "nine person roof rack," because a comma was left out between person and roof. *snicker*
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1611mac
Funny how things have come "full circle" for me personally. In the late 70's my first real job was working for a yellow page company in the "computer room." (a 16 bit nova clone)
Input for the yellow page ads came this way: The copy was typed on IBM Selectric typewriters and then my job was to "scan" (OCR) the typed sheets to convert to "electronic format."
Soon after that "terminals" came in and there was no more scanning.
Now here we are in 2011, 35 years later and OCR is a major reason I can enjoy old classic books!
Weird  |