Business Insider | Obsolete technologies don't die right away, they just move to places like India. Such was the case with typewriters, which were produced by Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai until recently.Now the typewriter era is officially over.
Godrej & Boyce's Milind Dukle tells the Business Standard:
"From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year.
"We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters. Currently, the company has only 500 machines left. The machines are of Godrej Prima, the last typewriter brand from our company, and will be sold at a maximum retail price of Rs 12,000."
The factory has been converted to a refrigerator manufacturing unit.
4 comments:
My daughter interviewed me and several other folks (including my mother-in-law who worked in semi-conductor fabrication during the 1980's in Massachusetts)
Route 128 was the original silicon valley, but all of those high-end UNIX workstation and mid-range companies have long since fallen by the wayside. The pervasive and consumer accessible PC with GUI was in large measure the death of these machines and the companies that made them.
Interestingly the Android phones we each carry in our pockets is considerably more powerful than those $18,000-$50K workstations, and I believe the hardware to support the heavily GUI'd Android and iPhones is substantially less than $20/unit.
Interestingly she used her Android to record all these interviews, and I wouldn't be surprised if with a little effort, the same device couldn't actually be used to transcribe some of that recorded audio.
CNu - I wouldn't be surprised if with a little effort, the same device couldn't actually be used to transcribe some of that recorded audio
The API supports it and would take about 3 lines of code to implement. The transcription happens Google-side just like when doing a voice search.
http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/speech-input.html
The Android API only supports GUI controls for transcribing. I'm betting there's an undocumented Google API that will transcribe just like Google Voice.
Post a Comment