Some of us can remember when typing an exclamation mark required hitting four different keys: the shift key, the apostrophe, the backspace, and the period! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Typing Punctuation on Old Typewriters, The Hard Way”
I found myself lately talking to younger folks and saying,
When I was your age, we didn’t have an exclamation mark on the keyboard.
Do you remember the days when to make an exclamation mark,
You had to do an apostrophe and then backspace and put a period there?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I also remember there being, what was it, no one?
You had to use a lowercase L?
Yes.
Yeah, there’s a few of those.
Life was tough back then.
It was hard.
Young people today don’t appreciate that, right?
And it was so hard to get to the emoji row.
You had to hold down all these special keys.
I know.
Turn the plate in a certain way.
That emoji row only had 15 faces on it.
Yeah, it wasn’t even a gleam in our eye, was it?
No, it wasn’t.
It was very far away.
