Want to Time Travel Back to the 80s? Visit a Prison “Typing Room”

Yes, there are computers. But they run on simplistic, primitive systems that may have been the cat’s meow 16 years ago, but are in desperate need of an upgrade.

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But the most striking anachronism in the legal library is the electric typewriter, a true icon and state-of-the-art staple of the 1980s. It’s always fun to watch the faces of criminal justice students touring the prison, wide-eyed and fearful. We are the wild beasts in the zoo that they’ve been told about and here we are in our natural habitat, here in the legal library fighting our cases on typewriters. They’re probably thinking, Good Lord! How do you edit? How do you copy/paste? How do you spell-check?

Well, you don’t. You type. You make mistakes. You retype. You make mistakes. You retype. The machine malfunctions. You retype. You type “nad” instead of “and,” “alwyas” instead of “always,” and my personal favorite: “shit” instead of “this.” On a word processing program all such mistakes would be auto-corrected. Here we proofread and proofread and proofread. Ever hear of that old Greek myth about Sisyphus, the guy who had to keep rolling a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again for all eternity? Proofreading is crucial. Silly mistakes could easily be overlooked. A “MOTION TO VACATE” could easily end up as a “NOTION TO VACATE,” a notion all inmates entertain at one time or another.

Fernando Rivas

Source: Want to Time Travel Back to the 80s? Visit a Prison “Typing Room”