Where it all began.... an interesting question.  I was about 12 years old when I was in the basement of my friends house right across the street from my own.  Being the nosy kid I was I saw a tiny typewriter in a battered case and discovered that it was a Corona Model 3 folding typewriter.  I was immediately hooked.  Being a charming 12 year old I somehow got my friends father to give me the typewriter.  Maybe it was the obsessive look in my eyes that told him I needed it very, very badly, that my life was forever changed and I had to have it.   Whatever the case, it became mine and I took it home, cleaned it up, tinkered with it for days on end and finally got it working again.  I had that typewriter from age 12 until I was 35 years old.  I never fell out of love with it but life happened and I was pulled into a thousand different directions and I sold the typewriter for a pittance at a garage sale.  I have very, very few regrets in life but selling that typewriter is one of them.  I never forgot about it and it haunted me for years thereafter.

When I retired a few years after the turn of this century I wanted another Corona 3, it's all I could think about, but they surely had become expensive and I wanted a working one, or close to it.  I have been obsessed with the Machine Age for decades and later in life I began collecting office items from that time.  That Corona 3 in my friends basement has been the cause of all of it.  To date I have collected 9 typewriters, and yes I got my Corona 3 again, it's beautiful but I had to work at it to get it there, so I feel like I'm 12 again in many respects.  But I also have Edison mimeographs, a Dictaphone, a stenotype, a couple of Burroughs adding machines, and dozens of small desk items one would use in a Victorian office. 

When I was in high school my parents bought me a 1954 Royal typewriter which I used often.  I loved it but I was not obsessed with it like I was the Corona 3 or items from that era.  I no longer have the 1954 Royal but Machine Age typewriters still cause me to get that glassy-eyed look when I come across them.  If one must have an obsession, I can't think of anything better than being hooked by the magnificence of an old typewriter.      

I.den wrote:

It was a Remington Standard 10 that wasn't working, but was the thing that pushed me over the edge. I started looking and reading, and eventually decided that an Olivetti Lettera 32 was the one for me. 
Having bought that, I was finally able to check out what typing on an actual typewriter was like (I might have to add I'm only 28 years old, so I didn't grow up with manual typewriters, although I do remember typing on my father's Brother Electric typewriter). I found the experience to be exhilirating. 
I bought the book by dr. Richard Polt about the typewriter revolution, and started wondering whether perhaps it wouldn't be nice to have an Olympia, next to my Olivetti. 
Once I had the Olympia, I thought it might be fun to have a Smith Corona.
Etc. etc..

Oh my, oh my... I know that story well. I had another typewriter, but what definitely gave me typewriter fever was a Lettera 32 when I was 28 as well! Now I´m 32, so I guess it´s not that different.

I just stumbled upon this thread. I believe was having an umbrage at the time.

beak wrote:

Of all the complicated reasons why, the one that lasts, and is always uppermost, is the atmosphere of quiet and concentration that the TW gives me.  My computer always seems to be urging me to; "Get on with it! - you're wasting power!  My battery's running down!"  and to distract me; "Perhaps you should check your e-mails? - it has been ten minutes, and something important may have cone in.  AND what about those photos you took this morning - you need to edit those - they're only a click away..."

But the TW asks nothing and says nothing, it just waits, silently.

Writing on the computer can turn into a massive editing session, but with the TW, if it's wrong, you rewrite rather than edit, and so I find the rewriting often fresher and better than the piece which is just a mass of patching up.

I've noticed the over-editing syndrome at work. Too carefully crafted emails invariably go out with syntactical errors - the harder I try to get it perfect the more likely I am to create non-sentences, since when you go back and remove words or reword you can forget to adjust some other part of the sentence to suit. If you rewrite the entire sentence this is not going to happen. Typing is more like natural speech - you can't erase what you just said, you can only go back and try again.

I.den wrote:

I knew that he wrote using a typewriter (who didn't in those times?), but to see his manuscripts, one full typewritten page (single line) with pencil marks all over the place, complete paragraphs striked out, that really struck me. The pure concentration that must've cost. Imagine him sitting behind his typewriter, stamping out his tirade and then going through it with his pencil at hand, striking out what isn't harsh enough, or writing additional insults in the margins.

Then I wondered, would he have written the same novels if he had a computer? If he was able to not just strike through things he, on second thought, didn't think worthy of his book, but intervene directly in the text, would he still have been so expansive, so extreme in his writing? Or perhaps, sitting behind a computer, silently producing text, it wouldn't have given him the inspiration needed to harshly critize and ridicule everyone in Austria.

I learned to type (but never keyboard) on actual typewriters so I am a first generation immigrant returning to his native land rather than second or third generation who have only heard about the old country from their grandfather. I retain some feel of keyboard slamming when writing with invective on a computer - at least my coworkers have said so - when I assault computer keyboards and colleagues remark "You learned to type on a typewriter!". Which is true enough. Take THAT and THAT and THAT...

Much of what typewriters enabled we are better off without - roomfulls of clacking typewriter hell where wage-imprisoned women reproduced business letter that only their male bosses could possibly have had the literary skill to produce - but in the wholesale slaughter that followed their obsoletion we nearly lost what they are very, very good at. Slamming computer keys seems like something that might be overcome by therapy, but vigorously attacking a standard's keyboard is what the furshlugginer thing was made for!

Typewriters also do not try to spell check you - and lately even worse, grammar check you. So in the spirit of typewriting I write "roomfulls" and "osbsoletion" and "furshlugginer" and let them stand even though the post editor busily underlines them in squiggly red. Yes you infernal busy body program, I really meant to write that. When I want your opinion I'll beat it out of the keyboard.