Last week, just for antiquity’s sake, I put my paws on something I hadn’t touched in years.

Ah, the nostalgia! It was fulfilling to experience the freedom, the honest-to-goodness tactile sensation of letting my fingers go where they pleased.

But lest this seem like the opening scene of a racy novel, let me explain I’m referring to typewriters, nothing more. Coincidentally, the day after I actually typed an address on an envelope (probably the only use for a typewriter nowadays), I read an article in the Sunday Journal about many people who still use the things.

One of our regular Optic correspondents obviously has opted not to join the word-processor generation; another frequent letter-to-the-editor sender handwrites her submissions.

Let’s go back a while to Immaculate Conception School, in the mid-’50s, when our typing teacher, Sister Mary Helvetica Italica literally escorted me out of the first-year typing class because she didn’t want me taking up space in a room full of beginners. She was wrong, but there was some justification.

Let me explain:

My dad owned an Underwood portable on which I learned to type. But before regarding that as a many-splendored thing, I stress that there were still a number of finer points to typing I hadn’t mastered: how to tabulate, how to make corrections, forgetting to double-space between sentences and releasing the shift key in a hurry and causing elevated caps.

I wanted to learn the finer points, but my first time on the massive standard Royal typewriters in our school lab convinced our teacher I was a trouble-making wiseguy who wanted to show off. It was a reasonable assumption, inasmuch as I typed 55 wpm before entering the class.

But a simple check of my transcript would have proven my case. That didn’t work. I sat out Typing I that semester.

Typewriters weren’t easy to come by in those days. My part-time job at the Optic as a reporter for I.C. sports, was helped by the availability of a spare machine where my dad worked, at Werley Auto Co., on Grand, not far from the Optic. Soon, classmates Chris, Charlie and I were submitting most of our homework on typed sheets.

Once, one of the I.C. pastors, Father Paul Beattie, asked what I wanted to do with my life when I grew up. My answer: “I want to be a typist.” Honestly, at the time I imagined no finer use of manual and digital skills.

Well, the priest said I ought to use typing as a tool for writing, not as an end in itself. And not long afterward, an earlier classmate, Wilfred Martinez, asked me if I’d be interested in applying for a job, just like his, at the state hospital in town. “I’ll bet the minute they see how fast you can type, they’ll put you in the typing pool,” Billy said.

And so I checked. The supervisor at the time seemed eager to hire me — first for the summer before my senior year, then full time. But I observed some young people — most of them blimp-wristed — at their manual typewriters, plugging away for 15 minutes, taking a minute break, then continuing to type other people’s words.

I don’t believe “carpal tunnel syndrome” had entered the language in those days, but I’m sure the actual condition afflicted many. I never took the job, but somehow ended up doing what our pastor suggested, using typing as a tool.

Except for then-newish electric typewriters, far too sensitive for my heavy-fingeredness, I never imagined the typewriters could improve much more. The new Royals, for example, with a generous square carriage-return key, the automatic ribbon return and the tab key right next to the space bar were high-tech.

At the time IBM came out with the Selectric, it appears the old-fashioned keys-in-a-basket machines became obsolete. An IBM representative demonstrated the new machine at the Midwestern newspaper where I worked, and before the demo had concluded, my publisher had ordered a dozen. We were fascinated as we watched that little type ball rotating at blazing speed as it responded to rapid key strokes.

That flirtation with the ultimate in technology should have ended the chapter on old-fashioned typing machines, but not long after IBM captured the market, the computer revolution came about. So who needs a typewriter anymore? My neighbor and former colleague, Ron Maestas, says, “People ought to save their typewriters in case they need to address an envelope.”

I have generated this entire column on something called the iPad, a device about the size of an issue of National Geographic. It’s a great go-everywhere, do-everything machine, but typing on it is harder than it seems. I’m used to striking distinct keys and key combinations. With the iPad (and that’s a topic for a future column), it feels as if I’m typing on a pane of glass, which I guess I am.

But I still have affection for the ‘50s model Underwood I bought at an estate sale in Las Vegas. Buying a ribbon for it is virtually impossible, so I settled for any ribbon and performed the messy job of re-spooling it onto the original spools. And it works.

Old habits die hard. I left full-time teaching of journalism classes a dozen years ago, but even five or six years before that, computers and dot-matrix printers entered the field. I had always required students to “type all homework, double-space, use wide margins and proofread.”

Toward the end of my tenure, typing had already become passe for many students. And technically, they didn’t “type” anymore.

Regardless, isn’t it a whole lot easier to say “typed” than “computer-generated”? And does anybody proofread anymore? Know they don’t; now its called “spell-chequeing.”