OtinG wrote the following as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by OtinG
Just some fun facts:
Computers greatly affected the way many people edited their written work. With typewriters, which were very labor intensive, people tended to spend less time editing and reorganizing the papers they wrote because it was too inconvenient to have to retype several pages. But when PCs began to become more available in the 1980s, I remember reading research on how people who used them to write papers would typically spend way more time editing and reorganizing them because it was so easy to do on a PC. So quality of content tended to go up with PC use compared to typewriter use.
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The irony of the situation is that it was said that computers would reduce the amount of paper produced but it actually increased the amount of paper produced. This is due to the ease of reprinting.
Like you mentioned, in the days before word processors you would rarely retype an entire document for a minor correction, especially if your typewriter allowed you to easily make a neat correction (like an IBM Selectric II). For me there was one exception to this, I had a one type of document that had to be letter perfect and if I made the slightest error I had to retype the entire document. Once I was just about finished and all I had to do was type a period...but I hit a comma by mistake so had to retype it. That type of document made word processors a blessing.
Once machines that could store documents (such as memory typewriters, dedicated word processors, and word processing software on computers) became common, you would often see a document reprinted for the most minor of corrections. Plus, people would often repeated make revisions to documents just because it was so easy to do so.