The Hermes 3000, made by Paillard S.A., of Yverdon, Switzerland—now long out of business—was the king of the portables. Weighing 13 pounds, it was all steel, durable and engineered, well, like a Swiss typewriter. You could drop it down a marble staircase and it would live to write again.

I bought it in 1969, when I was 19. At the time, the $150 I paid for it—out of my paycheck as a motor-parts warehouse worker —was the most I’d ever spent on anything.

The clerk promised it would be my friend for life, and indeed, looking at it now, with the minor dust and grease buildup and missing ribbon, it would not need much to resume service. I named it John Henry, after the steel drivin’ man of 19th-century folklore who pounded rail spikes until his heart burst.

I used it for college homework, and I used it to bang out book reviews for The Minnesota Daily. I took it with me when I became a writer. I packed it in the trunk of my car on long trips and typed on it in motel rooms until the adulterers next door banged on the wall. I took it camping, to the Rockies, to Maine. I have pictures of myself in Guatemala, around 1978, and there is the Hermes upright against my right leg.

It was a responsive machine. Each key had terrific spring. There was no muzzy typing as with today’s keyboards. You pushed, it pushed back. That was interactivity, 1970s style.

The main differences between typewriting and writing by computer are the ability to save and edit files and block move. The "cut and paste" metaphor comes from newspapering, where writers literally cut their pieces up into strips and taped them back together in 8-by-11 sheets. Cut and paste, whether literal or figurative, was a tremendous liberation for writers. You could slap out words on the machine and figure out where they went as you worked.

But the old pros didn’t need to cut and paste. Machines like the Hermes taught you to think a piece through in advance. When you think of the elegant writing of yore, it is all the more remarkable that those long involved sentences were laid down like track, one word after another. Writing like that was thinking of a high order. I am too spoiled now by my PC to go back and replicate that method.

That old green Hermes allowed me to do the thing I am proudest of as a writer: writing an entire novel, 500 pages of track, end upon end. I pounded it out from 1980 to 1981. And I sent it around, with hopes of winning an advance in the low four figures. There was something I wanted desperately to buy with that money—an Apple II+, or maybe a TRS-80, to put an end to retyping.

The book was a long ordeal of toil, poverty and care to create near-perfect pages, pages that an editor would slap, saying, "Now, this is good stuff."

A comedy about the Second Vatican Council, the book I was sure would take the literary world by storm, was never published. Go figure.

My book never earned me the money to buy a computer. I was crushed. I knew I lacked the stuff to start at the bottom of the mountain with another book project, with only my noble Hermes 3000 to carry me over. Without block move, the prospect was unbearable.

And isn’t that the way of it: I had an Apple soon enough, paid for some other way. I liked it a lot. But something had changed forever. And I never again undertook the long journey I had taken with my old friend.