Prince Albert Daily Herald
The Prince Albert Historical Museum. Herald File Photo
The Prince Albert Historical Museum has revived an old campaign to help future generations understand the COVID-19 outbreak.
Last year, the museum put out a call for submissions from students, encouraging them to submit their views on what’s it’s like to like through a pandemic. Museum educator Joanna Wreakes said they received few responses, likely because the province was still early in its response.
With more than a year passed since Saskatchewan’s first recorded case, the museum has renewed their call for submissions, and expanded the field to include anyone in the community.
Prince Albert Daily Herald
by Ruth Griffiths
I enjoyed touring the Prince Albert Historical Museum following a guided walk on the Rotary Trail beside the North Saskatchewan River. A display of old business machines elicited memories of compact portable typewriters that my friend and I had used as young adults. During these Covid times we spend a lot of time using electronic keyboards, but we rarely think about how the standard keyboard came to be.
The first mechanical machine for writing letters was introduced 300 years ago. The typewriter was invented and reinvented several times. By about 1910, a more or less standardized version had emerged. Electric typewriters were introduced about a century ago but when I started work at The Daily Herald in 1981, we were still using manual typewriters in the newsroom. The noise was deafening! We switched to an electronic typesetting machine and soon after that personal computers, linked to a common memory storage area.