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I assume that this is the last *manual* typewriter factory.

Gotta be. There's still a fairly significant (captive) market for typewriters in prisons that continues to be met:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:walkenhorsts.com+typewriter
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://www.accesscatalog.com/+typewriter

(Though looks like they're mostly Swintec these days. E.g., http://www.swintec.com/clear-typewriters/21-2410cc-michigan.html)

We used to have to have specific manual typewriters (no built-in memory or spell-check) for law school exams, though that pretty much died off when ExamSoft (http://www.examsoft.com/main/index.php) became commonplace. I can't even remember the last time I saw a typewriter being used, though there are still a few sprinkled around the office...

At our university a lot of students bought or got brand new Vista laptops over the Christmas holidays and lo and behold they could no longer use the Cisco VPN client (4.8.01.0300) supposedly their is a beta that sorta works. We also found out a vendor called Examsoft which allows students to take tests on their laptop also wasn't compatible with Vista and there was no ETA when it would be.

This is going to be interesting for exam takers. My law school, and later the California State Bar exam, allowed laptops with ExamSoft software (http://www.examsoft.com/). For each exam you turned in one disk and kept for yourself a backup disk with your answer (the data was stored encrypted); there was also a tertiary backup stored on your hard drive in the event both floppies were bad. For the CA State Bar, with its two essay blocks and two "performance exams" over a two day period (with the multiple choice multistate exam on a full day in between), with no overlap and the disks vanishing up to Sacramento, using USB flash drives for that would be fairly expensive. (Of course, it costs $500+ to take the exam, plus getting a hotel room next to the testing site etc., so the cost, relatively speaking, isn't that great, and they'd pass the costs along to the test takers in any case...)

Still, for that particular problem, the floppy was a fairly elegant solution. The answer files were a couple of hundred kilobytes at their largest, the media was basically disposable and low-cost enough to be, as was necessary, single-use...

They are being used for exams. In the legal industry, Examsoft is gaining traction. Law schools use it to administer essay exams and California and Arizona (and probably more) use it to administer the essay portion of the Bar Exam. You take the exam on a laptop. To prevent cheating, the laptop boots in a safe mode, disconnected from any LAN or any other program.

So how do they receive the exams to grade? Floppy, of course. The files are small and giving a floppy to each student is a lot cheaper than giving each student a flash drive.

Do kids just type faster now?


YES. My wife just got through law school taking notes on a toshiba portege- super light weight. From her years as a legal assistant she can type WAY faster than most people can scratch answer with a pencil or pen. Also, she was allowed to type all of her finals (using examsoft).

since she can touch-type I remember her gloating about how the review for hte final in the last class for corporations was so content-packed, that she felt bad for anyone who had to handwrite all that and still follow along.

But you have to run some software from to take the exam.

This software will prevent someone from loading other packages during the exam. I guess they think that a lawyer would cheat on a bar exam. Nah, of course not. :)