There’s a wealth of little tidbits in this NY Times article about the closing of Tytell Typewriter Company, a Manhattan institution. Morley Safer uses and owns six Olivetti manuals. Andy Rooney started with WordPerfect a decade ago, but still owns 17 Underwood 5 manual machines “because I don’t want to run out of typewriters before I die.” People who have made the switch to word processing are being left behind also as rapidly evolving software and hardware make their systems as obsolete as printer ribbons. Writers complain about useless grammar and spell-checking, and the Microsoft Office Assistant. A Microsoft product manager says that the Office Assistant will be “off by default” in the next version of Word (XP). And in this article about The New Yorker entering the media era with its new website, Andrew Hearst tells of his job interview with their word processing team. In a room filled with people typing on Macs, he still had to prove his typing speed on an IBM Selectric II. (via LTSeek and MediaNews)