From Clacking Beginnings

Imagine pounding out your first draft on a remickety metal box where every key stroke meant wrestling with stuck typebars and inky ribbons that loved to smear – and one typo meant tossing the paper and starting over with zero templates or “undo.”¹ The 1874 Remington No.1 printed only capital letters and kept your typing hidden until you cranked the carriage – talk about suspense!²

To prevent constant jams, Christopher Latham Sholes arranged keys in the famous QWERTY layout, intentionally slowing typists to keep arms from clashing.³

Color, Correction, and the White-Out Revolution

By the late 1880s, dual-color ribbons let clerks flip from black to red ink – perfect for bookkeeping flair.⁴ But messing up was still a bear until Bette Nesmith Graham concocted Liquid Paper in 1951 to paint over errors.⁵ Europe answered with Tipp-Ex correction tape in 1959, giving us the verb “to tippex out.”⁶

Electric Buzz and Golf Balls

Electric typewriters buzzed to life in the early 1900s, but IBM really brought the juice in 1933 with its Model 01 electromatic.⁷ The 1961 IBM Selectric ditched typebars for a “golf ball” element that spun with every hit, ending jams and letting you swap fonts with a click.⁸

PCs, Word Processors, and WYSIWYG

IBM’s 1973 Mag Card II stored 8,000 characters magnetically – a word-processor tease.⁹ By 1983 Microsoft’s Multi-Tool Word (Word 1.0) let you bold, italicize, and undo at will on a CRT screen.¹⁰ Soon WordStar and WordPerfect bowed out as Word became the office MVP.

Speak, and It Writes

Dragon Dictate (1990) first turned speech into text for a cool $9,000, and by the 2010s Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant made talking your typing routine.¹¹

AI Takes the Keys

ChatGPT’s GPT-3.5 debut in Nov 2022 waltzed in with human-like prose and 100 million users in months.¹² Today GPT-4 and rivals spin up articles, jokes, and code in seconds – no fingers needed.

Timeline of Milestones