Angela Mulholland - There were many who mourned this week the news that the world's last typewriter manufacturer was preparing to shut its doors for good, spelling the end for the once-ubiquitous machines that had been made obsolete years ago.
But it seems reports of the typewriter's death were greatly exaggerated.
The misunderstanding began when the Indian newspaper, Business Standard, reported that Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing Co. Ltd. -- a company it described as "the world's last manufacturer of typewriters" -- was trying to unload the last of its machines.
"We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters," Milind Dukle, Godrej and Boyce's general manager-operations, told the paper. "We are not getting many orders now."
The story got picked up by other media outlets, who wrote such headlines as "The typewriter's day is nearly done" and "It's farewell to the typewriter" and "Point of no return for typewriters" (Get it? No return? Like a hard carriage return?)
And the collective Internet wept.
Even among a population that clearly embraces technology, the typewriter news seemed to emit a wave of nostalgia. People posted and reposted the story on Twitter so quickly that the hashtag "RIP typewriter" began trending within hours of the report.
Sentimentalists typed out their lament for device that was once a mainstay of office life -- seemingly forgetting the aggravation of jammed-up keys, the intoxicating stench of Liquid Paper or the inky hell that was changing a typewriter ribbon.
Columnist John Scott Lewinski, who usually writes gadget reviews for the technology website CNET, called the slow fade of the typewriter "the death of another little bit of cool the world will never get back."
Even Perez Hilton weighed in, noting on his blog: "We'll miss the loud click-clacking and chime! Just think of all the amazing books and literature that were written on those!"
Well, it seems to all have been a great big misunderstanding.
Typewriters aren't dead. Manual, office-based typewriters might be fading from use, but portable typewriters are still being made, and electric typewriters are still very much alive and well, strange as it seems.
Eric Wagner of Wagner Office Machines in Chicago told the Chicago Tribune that his company still sells lots of electric typewriters.
"There are typewriters still in almost every office, but not as many as there used to be," he said. "We work on them all day long, from all over the place. And people still buy new ones when the old ones break."
Typewriters, it seems, come in mighty handy for filling out forms, especially those that need to be filled out in triplicate. Plenty of police stations still require their officers to fill out carbon-paper documents, such as evidence vouchers.
Another key market for typewriters? Prisons.
One company called Swintec, says it creates clear, transparent typewriters specifically for prisons.
"We have contracts with correctional facilities in 43 states to supply clear typewriters for inmates so they can't hide contraband inside them," Swintec general manager of sales Ed Michael explained to the National Business Review.
David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam killer, is said to still use a Swintec to type out all the letters he sends out each week to acquaintances.
Michael told CNN that there's still a place for electric typewriters, which are much more sophisticated than their manual cousins yet simpler than a computer.
"Some (typewriters) have memory; some don't," he said. "Even spell check. You can save the document in the machine's memory, call it up at a later time. It doesn't go on the Internet, but it saves inside the typewriter itself. It has a ribbon, it has a print wheel. You can change the character style (50 variations) by changing the wheels. There's many applications that are easier than a computer."
