GOODBYE TO TYPERWRITERS

            The typewriter, rather than the computer, was responsible for creating the modern office. But now, the only company in the world that still makes and sells them says there are just 500 left, an no more are to be made.

 India is well-known for its legions of computer programmers, but the country also has another face as the last bastion of the typewriter. Manual typewriters stayed popular in India long after developed nations had entirely switched to the keyboard and mouse.

            As recently as the 1990s, the Mumbai plant of a company named Godrej Computers have largely replaced typewriters today. and Boyce was turning out 50,000 typewriters a year. They were popular in a nation where reliable electricity supplies - essential for computers - are still by no means guaranteed.

            But even in India, typewriter sales have slumped in the last ten years. Gradually, every manufacturer stopped making them, leaving only Godrej's Mumbai plant - an that switched to making fridges two years ago. And now the firm says it only has 500 typewriters left in stock.

            It's a far cry from the heyday of the 1950s, when India's then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru held up the humble typewriter as a symbol of the nation's independence an industrialisation.

            The first commercial typewriters were produced in the United States in the 1880s. The typewriter was the dominant office technology for more than a century until the computer came along.

                                                                                  (MARK GREGORY)