When you were typing on the Monotype D keyboard, your eyes were watching the copy, your fingers were on the keyboard but your brain was a million miles away. Being a young boy, it was probably girls or football or beer. You’d rarely make a mistake and you used to go like the clappers. If you did make a mistake, you knew automatically, as soon as you hit a wrong key, you went, “bugger”, stopped it, and put a bit of paper on the punch tape.

When we went onto the Monophoto 600s, things were different. When you got to the end, the drum went round and the little bell went off, and you used to justify the line, according to what the drum said. On the Monophoto, you used to watch the little light going down and when it got to the justification area, you then made a decision: is that the end of the line?

The good thing was that you could type a word, and until you hit the word space, that word never went onto the tape. So if you made a mistake you just stopped, cancelled and went on and on. That was phenomenal. Because that was eight-hole tape – you could actually read it. You’d see the word “the” and the word “and” and certain letters.

I showed my girlfriend one day. She went, “Oh, right”. She sounded really impressed. Yeah, right.

Bill Chapman

Print’s Past excerpts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of  Printing, and are due to be published in a forthcoming book.

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