KatLondon wrote:

It doesn't look that pleasant to use though, does it?

I agree. Actually, I find it rather soulless. A lot of plastic and a circuit board, it's pretty far removed from a manual typewriter, even an electromechanical one for that matter. Still, if I was in prison I'd be overjoyed to have one; something tells me that a fountain pen would be considered to similar to a shiv, so a typewriter of any kind would be a godsend in such an environment. And speaking of environments, they knocked down the utilitarian prison in my area a few years ago, presumably because it was overflowing with human rats, and replaced it with one several times larger that has the facade of a grand hotel. The sight of that grandiose waste of taxpayer's money sickens me every time I drive by it, and it wouldn't surprise me if there's a Swintec in every cell.  

TypewriterKing wrote:

Stevetype33 wrote:

Uwe: You're right about the wood-effect Royal - it's yuck squared. But if you look at these uggos long enough they do start to exert a hypnotic fascination...

I don't know about that. I tried for awhile, now my head hurts and I need eye bleach.

I liked the first Fleetwood I bought because I bought it cheap and it worked fine. Functionality gives any machine a veneer of beauty. I went on to buy a second one inexpensively with the genuine transistor radio - I had thought up to then that the claim that some had radios built in was a joke.  I have since seen the identical machine in different color schemes with different model names, but you have to stop somewhere.

Regarding "inmates" - that is an odd term for prisoner now that I think about it, and no doubt yet another link in a chain of failed euphemisms - like "asylum" for what we would now call a psychiatric hospital. It was a nice thought: the state is not imprisoning the guests with differing perceptions of reality, it is only providing "asylum". Only the strongest of words can survive such treatment: weaker words accumulate the full weight of whatever you were cleverly trying to euphemize until they too are discarded. Try using "retarded" today for anything except spark plug timing!