A little history….

In 1980 at the age of 18, I started my first real job in a business equipment store in West Chester, PA called Schaeffer’s Business Machines. They primarily sold Royal office and portable typewriters, Sharp copiers, Canon calculators, and (believe it or not) Roneo mimeograph and electronic stencil cutting machines. Like most dealers at the time, Schaeffer’s also provided full service and support on anything they sold. I was a nervous wreck, as I knew nothing about office equipment and supplies. My job was to work at the front counter greet customers, sell supplies, receive carry-in machines for the service department, and to assist in the sales of equipment to walk-in customers and potential new business clients.

After three months there, I was almost relieved of my duties permanently as I was so completely lost that one of the managers told me they were going to have to let me go if I wasn’t going to be able to sell the correct supplies and learn how to use the equipment they sold. They gave me about two more weeks to pull it together. I wanted very badly to keep this job and fortunately I was struck with an inspiration. I decided to spend most of my time in the warehouse in the back of the store and organize the myriad of varieties of ribbons, inks, toners, stencils, cartons of copier and mimeo paper, and miscellaneous supplies. My logic was that if I organized the mess in the warehouse I would get to know the supplies and the machines they worked with. Well, it worked. In two weeks the owner and manager saw a dramatic increase in my knowledge of the inventory and could see that I was genuinely interested in working there, and were impressed with the newly organized warehouse.

1980 marked the transition from electromechanical to electronic typewriters. As much as I hated to admit it, I liked typewriters, especially the office typewriters. IBM’s patent on single elements typewriters had just expired and all the other typewriter manufacturers were finally able to compete with IBM’s Selectric. IBM still dominated the office typewriter market, but Adler Royal’s German made SE5000CD single element self-correcting typewriter was a distant #2 and in many ways a drastic improvement on IBM’s models. I thought they were neat and I loved playing with them. Sometime around 1981 Adler/Royal came out with one of the first office electronic typewriters, which used daisy wheels instead of a “ball”. They were faster, sleeker, and fully automatic. Instead of pressing the correct key and then retyping the character to erase a previous mistake, you simply pressed the correction key and since the machine remembered the last several lines of characters typed it would magically and instantly lift the mistake off the paper with the touch of just one button. If your mistake was a couple lines previous, you would simply press the index up button and forward space or backspace to the incorrect character or word and press the correction key and presto the mistake was gone! All you had to do was type the correct character and then press “relocate” and it would automatically take you back to your last typing position on the page. It was like magic and this was a HUGE revolution in office typewriters. There was a very high “neat” factor in these whiz bang features and I was hooked. Within less than a year Royal introduced memory typewriters that stored 8K of memory (equivalent to 4 pages).  There was no display, you would type and edit the text directly on paper, but once the page was just what you wanted, like a commonly used form letter, you stored it in the typewriter’s memory, and then later if you wished to retrieve it you pressed a couple of keys and the typewriter automatically reprinted the entire page in letter quality at 17 cps. It was fascinating to watch it print. I was hooked even more.

During the electronic revolution of typewriters and my intense interest in them, I had gotten my job down to a science. Everything ran smoothly on the front end and I had plenty of extra time to play with all of the office equipment, especially the electronic typewriters. Desktop office computers were on the horizon and some dealers had started to sell them, but many dealers and people at that time still viewed computers as mysterious and complicated, including me. The $5K to $8K price tags of these desktop computers didn’t help the situation much either. Wang dominated the word processor market and some of these features had begun to trickle down into electronic office typewriters such as 40-80 character LED displays, global search and replace, and the ability to move an entire paragraph from one location to the next. Royal had finally come out with an office electronic typewriter with a large green LED display and what at the time seemed like extensive editing capabilities. One model in particular sticks in my mind. I was called the Royal 5040. The keyboard was actually separated from the printer via a coiled cable that resembled a telephone cord. You could sit back with the keyboard in your lap; type onto the display or directly onto paper. The advantage of the display was that you could see what you were typing on it first before committing it to paper and you could also use it to edit stored documents. It was beautifully designed and exhibited typical German quality in manufacturing.

By this time (1983) things were moving very quickly in the office equipment industry and computers were beginning to become more plausible for many small businesses. Almost everything made by the time had some digital component to it. Even the mimeograph machines had digital counters that you could use to set the number of copies you wanted to print. It was also becoming quite apparent by then, that mimeo machines were about finished, being replaced in droves by smaller and smaller plain paper copiers. About the only places still buying mimeo machines by this time were churches and schools. Mimeos still held an advantage in that you could print in multiple colors on one page, provided you changed the stencil for each color and changed the ink drum. Yes, it was as arduous as it sounds, but if you knew what you were doing, it wasn’t a big deal and the end product could be quite stunning. We were still very much in the scissors and glue period of desktop publishing. Cutting and pasting actually meant you had to cut out and paste images and text onto paper.

By 1984 and age 21, I was bored with the job, there wasn’t anything left for me to learn on the electronic typewriters I had played with day in and day out. I was tired of living way out in Chester County and I was spending most of my free time in Center City. I dreamt of living there. The owner of the dealership was in his mid 70’s and we always had a tenuous working relationship at best. And for reasons I won’t get into here, I was finally let go, the relationship I was in at the time was also falling apart and the lease was up on the townhouse we rented together for 3 years. We split up and I found a large 1 bedroom apartment in Center City for the princely sum of $325.00 a month. I moved in with my 13” color TV, a mattress, a Commodore VIC-20 and 300 baud modem, some stereo equipment, and a few bags of clothes. That was it, and I was in heaven! Problem was I didn’t yet have a job and didn’t know how I was going to pay the next month’s rent or eat.

I decided to look in the yellow pages for a job. I looked under typewriters, and I saw a listing for Bundy Typewriter. I called the number and asked them if they were interested in hiring an experienced typewriter salesman and was instantly connected to a manager who interviewed me the next day and I was hired immediately. I had heard of Bundy Typewriter while I worked out in West Chester. They were a very large typewriter dealership, one of the largest in the country and had a large sales force. When I walked into the dealership for the first time to be interviewed, I witnessed bedlam; the store was packed with customers, salesmen, and shelves full of dozens of different kinds of typewriters. The phone was ringing off the hook non-stop being answered by two young women who were so frazzled answering a phone that never stopped ringing that you could barely understand the words that came out of their mouth when they answered.

I stayed at Bundy’s for 10 years until 1994 and then came back for a one-year stint in 2000 as an Inventory Supervisor implementing a Mac based inventory management program to keep track of incoming and outgoing stock. In 2001 I started school at CCP and in 2004 I graduated with honors with an Associate in Liberal Arts degree. I really wanted to start working at that point but was strongly advised to pursue a Bachelor’s degree. I decided if I was going to do that there was only one place where I would go if accepted and that was The University of Pennsylvania. I applied, got accepted and was given a full scholarship. This set the tone of the next 7 years. I attended school half time pursuing a Bachelor’s degree at Penn while being self-employed in computer technical support.

It got to a point when I had to chose a major and I decided on Anthropology with a concentration in archaeology, as I have always been very interested in the material remains of ancient civilizations. Fast forward to December 2011 and much to my surprise I completed Penn’s stringent requirements for a degree in Anthropology and graduated in December 2011. Commencement is coming on May 13-14 2012.

I set up this blog to combine my two loves, computers and tech gadgets and archaeology. I’ve studied many aspects of archaeology from experimental, to Roman, to Trojan, to historic. While at Penn I spent two seasons in the field in Vineland NJ under the tutelage of Dr. Robert Schuyler, excavating the yard of one of the original homes built when this Victorian era town, in the middle of the NJ Pine Barrens was founded in 1861. I love Apple equipment and have since 1984. They had their ups and downs and came out with some real clunkers, but overall their equipment is made well and their user interface is both elegant and easy. I also like Windows equipment but not the way I feel about Apple. That being said, Windows has come a long way and I realized that ignoring 90% of the market would not be wise.

I hope you find my reviews of tech gadgets and computers and the latest archaeology news useful and fun to read. Enjoy!

Wayne Ziegler