Typewriter

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This is the book our son got from his school yesterday. Every day the children get a different book to read as homework.

A record player, a dip pen, an ink bottle and a typewriter

Here are two items I keep on my desk at work.

Here’s another thing I keep in my office.

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The End of an Era

This week I’ve been throwing a few things from my office away: stuff, mainly student assignments, that I don’t need to keep anymore.

I’m what they call a senior lecturer here in the UK, according to Wikipedia that’s an ‘associate professor’ elsewhere, and for that reason I’m involved in marking student work. Old assignments used to get stored centrally, but a few  years ago management decided that we should store them in our office [1]You might think that means we have less space, but management also took our printers and our waste bins away, so that gave as a cubic metre of extra space back.. We only need to keep them for a few years, then we can get rid of them. During my clear out session I came across some of the last type written feedback sheets I made.

Yes, the assignment is to programme a pencil museum (using PHP, AJAX and MySQL). Parts are pixelated for privacy

Our feedback sheets used to be spaced just right for typewriters [2]but unfortunately no one else I knew seemed to make use of this feature, or if they did it was before my time, i.e. before I joined in 2001. and used carbonless copy paper. They have since been replaced with new feedback sheets that don’t leave space for feedback.

The real feedback is on the pages with code, this is just for the cover page

To celebrate the end of the typewriter friendly era in my place of work I thought I show you how these sheets looked like (cropped for privacy reasons). I sometimes used them with a portable typewriter I bought second hand in the 1980s, but most times feedback was handwritten.

References

References
1 You might think that means we have less space, but management also took our printers and our waste bins away, so that gave as a cubic metre of extra space back.
2 but unfortunately no one else I knew seemed to make use of this feature, or if they did it was before my time, i.e. before I joined in 2001.

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