This is how technologies end, with a whimper

The Guardian carries a story about one of the last typewriter repair shops in Goa, India:

It started as a sideline to the main business of the store, but now it is the main earner for Luis Francisco Miguel de Abreu as he struggles to maintain one of the last typewriter repair shops in this Indian state.

Inside the shop, several typewriters sit in various states of repair, looking much like museum pieces. There is a Hermes, a Remington and a Godrej Prima, from the Indian manufacturer that was the last company in the world to make typewriters.

One of the things that caught our eye was that manufacturer, Godrej and Boyce, for one of us worked with them - tangentially - back in the early 1990s on the leap to an entirely new chip architecture for computer workstations. That form of chip didn’t work out but we do think it fun that G&B was still making typewriters up to 2011, as The Guardian tells us. There’s a lot of overlap as technologies replace each other that is.

Further, old technologies never truly die. They might become insignificant in the general scheme of things but true death never does quite happen. It might end up being only the period movie business that will still use typewriters but it’s never actually going to end. As with Prince Phillip being a continued user of the services of buggy whip manufacturers.

It’s also true that the old technologies can sometimes still be the appropriate ones. We’ve been assured that this story is true, perhaps the most effective and efficient piece of foreign aid ever - a batch of manual typewriters. Madagascar had, as is obvious in an ex-French colony, a rigorous and complex paper based bureaucracy tracking land ownership. Typewriters are language based, different keys and keyboards are used for different vernaculars. These do also wear out, they’re mechanical devices after all.

At one point is was noted that no one could transfer land in Madagascar, for the typewriters were so worn that they could not imprint through the necessary carbon paper. Not having a market in land was of course hugely detrimental to the growth, even functioning, of the economy. A batch of Malagasy typewriters were made up on a special order and delivered. For the sake of those few thousands of dollars that entire portion of the economy was able to work again.

There’s no grand point here, it’s just an observation. Technologies don’t so much die as just become smaller, never quite shrinking away to nothing.