Mysterious keys (7) : @

Younger viewers may wonder why a typewriter keyboard has @ on it*. Surely typewriters predate electronic email and even social media where the @ is in very common use? Well indeed that is true they do, despite this typewriters have included @ since the late 19th century almost universally. This is because the @ symbol has another important use which predates computer communications by many decades.

@ is an abbreviation for "at a rate of". As we saw earlier in this series (the fractions episode especially), typewriters in their heyday were working machines not something poseurs and hipsters fart around with using them for nonsense (such as creating blogs about them). One major real use for typewriters was to create and fill in forms and invoices and other business communications. Here the @ symbol was very useful indeed. One example might be an invoice where you would list the cost of a widget such as "5 widgets @ £10 each". Nowadays of course typewriters can also type someone's social media handle...

* This post is inspired by a question on Stackexchange asking why typewriters have the @!

The Telephone at Work

A wonderful short instructional film from 1972 on how to get the best use out of your telephone in a work situation and not, as happens in the opening minute, the phone making you so enraged that you end up shooting it (which lets face it, isn't very British!) 

The film covers basic phone etiquette (which is mostly about just being polite, something a lot of people still need to learn). The film includes a whole host of GPO 746 dial phones though also look out for a cheeky pair of trimphones too. It is a wonderful little slice of the early 1970s British office life. Look out for Leslie Schofield in the workshop.

PT800 ribbon

The last typewriter for now to receive a new ribbon is the Boots PT800. This is a standard Seiko built machine so the ribbon installation was fairly painless. The typewriter doesn't work that well, i thought it was maybe just a bit stiff before but now it seems there may be more issues. It does work though requires a bit of patience.

The humble date stamp

The "paperless office" has never really existed. Even with all sorts of new fangled electronic forms and PDFs (even worse, PDF forms - a horror i sometimes have to build in my day job) there is still a place for paper. There is also still a place for the humble date stamp. It is a simple and effective way to mark... well the date on something, such as documents which have arrived. I had to get one of course, just in case i ever open my own library. It does take a little practice though to get the stamp correct...

Typing on a Royal 200

Another typing video.