I know what he means. For people raised before the personal computer transformed lives, workplaces and everything else, the sounds made by typewriters evoke solid memories. They make beautiful noise and there is not a newspaper person of a certain age who does not feel this way. A typewriter’s sound conjures the charming chaos that used to exist in newsrooms — the sound of effort, of work. For me, it’s even more personal, for my earliest memories are often accompanied by the sound of the typewriter on which my late father banged out — two fingers pounding furiously — books about Chicago’s raucous history in his closet-like office in our family’s Old Town apartment. His typewriter is now my typewriter, that Royal from the 1930s.