What paintings and photos cannot tell
Friday, December 5, 2008

When I started to write movie scripts I borrowed a book at the library on the subject. The author of the book enhanced the advantages of doing a copy of the script from time to time, even if it was tiresome.

A copy meant typing a second copy on your typewriter.

It was a long time ago that you needed to use the typewriter to get a second copy. Even if you still used a typewriter, there was a duplicator machine called Xerox when I grew up.

I know what a typewriter is, but I have never done any real work on one. The most I have done on a typewriter was when I helped my mother on her job filling out forms.

Have you seen the old Disney films with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse? When they eat corn/maize they eat a row and then there is a ping and then they slide back and continue eating on the next row.

That is a reference to a typewriter. You typed a row and when the end of the paper got close there was a ping. Then you finished the word and started a new line.

This knowledge is about to pass into history.

While we still can watch paintings, read the writers of old time, look at photos and watch movies from a more modern time, the knowledge about these little things might disappear.

In a few decades when they do a movie containing a typewriter the “ping” might be missing and no one reacts because they are all gone.