Bloomberg Defends City Spending On Typewriters
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - He's the man whose name is on and who made a fortune from the Bloomberg terminal, he reads remarks from an iPad, and he wants New York to be the world's leading digital city.
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But Mayor Michael Bloomberg finds himself defending the city's use of and spending money to maintain more than 1,000 pieces of retro technology called the typewriter.
"Particularly in old line government organizations, there's still lots of forms where we have to fill them out in duplicate, and a computer doesn't do that well and they still use it. Nobody's using a typewriter because they want to. They're using a typewriter because they have to," he said.
Eighteen city agencies still use a total of more than 1,000 typewriters including the NYPD, buildings department, and the human resources administration.
"They still have a function and your belief that typewriters have gone away is just erroneous. There are companies that make typewriters around the world," Bloomberg said. "It's like books. Some people, believe it or not, still read books in paper."
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