Barney & Clyde by Gene Weingarten; Dan Weingarten & David Clark for April 08, 2012

It was mainly a marketing decision. The letters that actually spell the word typewriter are on the first row of letters.

It’s true they moved certain keys apart for this reason, but they also put the most used keys on the left side of the keyboard as an additional means of slowing the typing process to avoid jamming. Or so I learned from my typing teacher and from numerous web searches.

And most people look at an old typewriter and ask if it would be so hard to reach up and pull back the jammed arms.What they don’t realize is that the QWERTY decision was made way back with EARLY typewriters that drove the type arms up onto the underside of the paper. Apparently you could reach the end of the page before you realized that the arms had jammed.

This made me look through my desk drawers on a hunch and yup, I still have one of those wheel like erasers and attached brush to fix those errors. I actually saw one of those erasers in a sculptor park in downtown Seattle, but about twelve feet tall though.

Yay…more “useless info” to spring on everybody!

“Why can’t a comic strip just be to laugh at ?”

They can be. Many are. Many also try to be something more, to varying degrees of success.

If you read a comic strip and learn something you didn’t know before, do you feel cheated?

She might think he’s old, but Wite-Out only dates back to the 70s. Barney should have said Liquid Paper, invented in 1951 by Mike Nesmith’s mother.

Or those round eraser-brush things. THOSE date back even further.

“etoain shrdlu”, anyone?

Old is when you remember “before whiteout”.