Clicking through to this 1961 IBM 72 SELECTRIC typewriter, on sale at eBay (hilarious – go read), pointed to by James Taranto, I realized, with a jolt, that these things were still in use in my current place of employment, when I first came to work there in 1989.

I don’t know about the US, but in Israel the public sector always seems to be the last to hear of any new inventions, although things have improved considerably. It took them a while more to discover computers in my workplace, and some people are still not convinced that it would be far better to computerize their card indexes, instead of writing them by hand (!!!).

Well, I will live in the Middle East. I sometimes find it hard to believe that such wonderful scientific research is going on in this country and amazing innovations are being developed, while money is so scarce at my place of work that they can hardly afford pens and paper (and isn’t that a good reason for computerization? A modern-ish version of ‘Let them eat cake’…).