From Typewriters to T1

The most precious possession I lugged to the Yard in September 1977 was a burnt-orange Smith Corona electric typewriter. With its snap-in, snap-out ribbon enabling quickie corrections, it represented advanced technology for its day. It would serve me trustily from my first freshman Expos essay to the last page of my senior thesis. Compared to the battered old black Royal manuals in the Crimson newsroom that became my home, it was a writer’s hot rod.

None of us realized it at the time, but these machines, hulking Royals and sleek electrics alike, were all on the verge of extinction. Apple and Commodore and Radio Shack had already started selling small computers to consumers, but it was the release of the IBM PC in the summer of 1981, shortly after my class’s graduation, that would not only seal the fate of a century’s worth of writing technology but also instigate a flood of social changes that are still unfolding around us.

Computers were a scarce commodity for the Class of 1981. When I took Nat Sci 110, the introduction to computing course, we had to fight for terminal time at the Science Center to run our little training programs on the resident minicomputer. In retrospect, I think we must have been the last class in which everyone typed (and laboriously retyped) their theses and sniffed the vaguely intoxicating fumes of liquid paper. On return visits to campus in the early eighties I’d notice the steady proliferation of PCs (and later Macs). The tools we used to learn and create were evolving, and the clacky typewriter was being left behind.

Other things were, too. Along with the black Royals and the reams of yellow foolscap we’d feed them, The Crimson newsroom of my era had inherited a strong sense of progressive tradition; the campus’s Vietnam-era turmoil was only a couple of four-year cycles behind us. We carried an activist torch, marched for divestiture, and protested the Carter-era revival of draft registration.

But left-leaning loyalties were hard to sustain through the malaise of the late seventies. In the 1980 election, during my year as Crimson editorial chairman, in a final gasp of last-ditch leftism, we endorsed the maverick candidacy of Barry Commoner. Having criticized what we saw as the Carter administration’s dangerous and ineffective turn to the right in the aftermath of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we thought that endorsing the Democrat would be hypocritical. For our purity, we got eight years of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s election, in the middle of our senior year, would be enshrined in mainstream political myth as a new morning, but to many of us it felt instead like night descending—a final curtain on the progressive era that, for kids our age, had been the only politics we’d ever known. We graduated into the worst recession since the Hoover era and a nation that had inexplicably elected a nuke-happy movie star from California. To this day, I associate that gloomy moment with the bleakly stirring sounds of the Clash’s 1980 “London Calling”: its images of a fascist clampdown and post-nuclear desolation suited the historical instant.

Still, despite the gloomy shift in the political weather, some certainties held strong: We knew that presidential power would never again run amok—Watergate had inoculated the nation against that, once and for all. And however far to the right the U.S. shifted, after Vietnam we knew we’d finally buried the arrogance of power. Never again would Americans invade a nation halfway around the world in order to bestow democracy at gunpoint. Right?

The nuclear fears of my graduating class were never, thankfully, borne out. Instead we have lived to see arguments we thought were well-settled reopened, and lessons we thought were well-learned ignored, by leaders whose careers we thought were well-buried. (Didn’t Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get voted out of the White House when we were in high school?)

As we refight those debates today to a heartbreaking background track of casualty reports, we have one advantage over our forerunners of the Vietnam era: direct access to an open and global communications network. I am happy, and lucky, to have made a journalism career on the Internet; building a news operation on the Web carried fond echoes for me of the years I spent at 14 Plympton Street. In all those late-night basement shifts, pasting up flats in the shop and developing plates for the press, The Crimson had taught me at least one thing: the best way to insure a free press is to own and operate one yourself.

Like computers, the news itself was scarcer during our pre-CNN, pre-Web college years. The Crimson newsroom of our era was dominated by the AP machine, a chest-high teletype that pumped bulletins into our midst by stamping upper-case letters onto an endless, Kerouacian scroll. During the Iran hostage drama that dragged on for what seemed like half our time at Harvard, Jim Hershberg ’82 would hover over the machine through the night, awaiting some hopeful breakthrough or awful denouement. Occasionally the bell would ring to announce some report of special note—though, by my senior year, it seemed to have gone haywire, and would “ding” wimpily at odd moments, for commodity prices and weather updates.

Today, the equivalent of that AP machine runs in a billion web browsers. And anyone can send reports out on the wire. The news may be no more cheerful than it was a quarter-century ago, but it is remarkably more accessible. It’s also more open to being influenced by everyday people—and will remain so, unless we screw up the Internet the way we’ve screwed up so many other things. I remind myself of this any time I get nostalgic for the sound of typewriter keys.



Scott A. Rosenberg ’81, who was Crimson editorial chair in 1980, is co-founder of Salon.com and is the author of the forthcoming book “Dreaming in Code.” He lives in Berkeley, Calif.