Keeping stuff: How to preserve course papers despite technological change

Typewriters

This is a page from the first essay I wrote as an undergraduate, dated October 18, 1968. I wrote it on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, a bulky, hot, durable machine that I wrestled with regularly for about ten years. The paper has a watermark that identifies it as Eaton's Berkshire Corrasable Bond, a drab, translucent paper, unpleasantly slippery to the touch. The advantage of this paper is that typewriter ink can be removed from it much more easily than from standard typing paper, so that one can correct typographical errors relatively easily and unobtrusively.

Unfortunately, this kind of paper strongly resists the application of ink with a pen. Ball-point pens tend to skip and scratch; ink from fountain pens tends to bead up and smear. You can see that my teacher was obliged to use a red pencil for his comments.

This paper also tore easily. There are a couple of notches along the bottom edge of the original, where I had trouble extricating the paper from the typewriter. Nevertheless, the paper has held up well enough and is still quite legible.

I still have the typewriter, so I can still make relatively unobtrusive corrections on this very paper if the need arises. But in this case I'm dependent on a technology that is obsolete and no longer supported. Someday, when it turns out that the typewriter needs a new carriage-return belt, or even a new ribbon, I'll be stuck -- some of the things that I can now do with my document will no longer be possible, not because I've failed to preserve the physical document, but because I've failed to preserve the technology on which it relies.