The market for typewriter ribbons

...has just taken another hit. I guess I had better retire my manual Corona. Fortunately the ability to type remains a useful skill...

The Telegraph reports:
End of an era as last mechanical typewriters are sold
An era of clattering keys and inky ribbons is coming to an end, as the world's last mechanical typewriter manufacturer has revealed it has only 500 left in stock.

"Godrej and Boyce, of India, ceased production in 2009 and has now almost cleared its remaining inventory, according to theBusiness Standard.

The firm's typewriter business peaked at 50,000 per year as the Indian economy took off in the 1990s, but tailed off as computers quickly took over.

"From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us," said general manager Milind Dukle.

"Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year," he added.

"Godrej and Boyce still sells a few of its remaining mechanical typewriters to defence agencies, courts and government offices in India"

The market for shorthand

When I was in high school in New York City in the 1960's, there was a department called Secretarial Studies that taught typing and shorthand (in two flavors, Gregg and Pitman). The students were mostly girls planning on looking for work as secretaries.

Well, recording machines changed the way people dictated letters (and computers of course changed it again), and nowadays the WSJ reports that you need a translator to recover the contents of old shorthand notes:Do You Know, Offhand, Anyone Who Knows Shorthand?As a Skill Fades, Translators Are in Demand; Ms. Sanders Charges 20.5 Cents a Word

It's probably also hard to find someone to repair buggy whips, not to mention recovering files stored in WordPerfect on floppy disks...

If anyone needs someone who once mastered Scribe (since displaced by TeX), let me know.