I typed the first draft of my dissertation on a manual Olympia typewriter. Much whiteout was consumed in that process. When I received that draft back from Dr. Gates with his comments, I passed that copy on, with my additional edits, to a woman who who did freelance word processing during off hours using her firm's word processor that was much like the one Solitaire describes.

The big inaccuracy with Happy Days (I assume you mean the TV program) was that even then Milwaukee was not the small town that it was portrayed as.


Here is another item from the past:



You are old if you recall using one of those. I can recall that in my second year of undergraduate university there was an ongoing debate in technical classes as to whether or not the few students that could afford the new hand-held scientific electronic calculators (this was around 1973 and Hewlett-Packard had just released the first mass produced model at a price tag of about $400, big money to a student back then) should be allowed to use these during exams when most still had to make do with slide rules.

If sometimes wonder if younger people who read older science fiction even know when characters in the stories who talk about using a slide rule what that character is talking about. Napier's bones.