OK for you youngsters out there who have never used an antique manual typewriter... heres a little trivia! :)

If you have ever seen one... (probably only in the movies for a lot of yous...) a manual typewriter has this black hard rubber roller contraption mounted on top where the paper rests providing a good support bed behind the paper so that when the type hammers with the actual type sets for each letter mounted on their ends, strike the paper, the ink makes a good uniform impression...  This "paper carriage" mechanism moves from right to left as you type, advancing one character at a time until you reach the far right side of the paper.  Of course some Typewriters were designed for Hebrew or Arabic, which goes the other way.  I don't know about machines designed for vertical Asian languages so thats something to learn about on Wikipedia.

Anyway, the pretty heavy duty Underwood® typewriter I remember my mother using when I was a wee lad had a pretty nice carriage mechanism and when the paper got to the far right margin you had to stop typing and then reach up with your right hand and pull a shiny chrome lever over to your left (which I remember felt really solid and secure, like the door on an expensive Mercedes feels like when you close it smartly shut).  This process of pulling the lever over to the left side, was called the "Carriage Return" and what it did was advance the paper up one line and return the entire sheet and hard rubber roller under it, back over to the left hand margin where you could then continue with your frenzied writing. (that is, once you got over your writers block or right brained contemplations of what you just wrote).

A skilled typist could get a nice rhythm going and the whole activity would take on a kind of ragtime tap dance mood due to the staccato sound of the striking keys followed by periods of a ding swish sound and pause (of the carriage return), followed by more staccato sounds, followed by another ding, swish, pause... repeating in a hypnotic ostinato cycle over and over again... "Ding sound?"  "Whats that you say?"  Did I fail to mention there is a little bell inside those old typewriters, not unlike the same bell found in an antique telephone. The bell warns you when you are getting close to the right margin, to help you pace yourself. Because of all this, the sound of typewriters has inspired many composers, and one popular song has become an all time favorite: "The Typewriter Song". Here, have a quick listen... while reading the rest of the article below...

Later on, when typewriters became "electric", (around the same time guitars did) that metal arm was replaced by an electro mechanical mechanism so you did not have to reach up with your right hand and pull a lever anymore.  The lever was replaced by a key on the keyboard which was called... guess what? The "Carriage Return Key", and so now you could use your right little finger to press a key on the right side of the keyboard (just above the shift key) instead of your entire fore arm to perform the same operation. This changed the classic typewriter sound a little bit, but not as much as it did when the entire carriage mechanism was finally replaced by a company called IBM who created these really expensive typewriters called: The Selectric® systems with their crazy removable dancing golf ball type heads that soon monopolized the entire work place and allowed you to try out different font type faces.

The carriage return key, which is the largest key on the keyboard other than the space bar, (which I don't actually call a "key") continued to be labeled: "Return", (dropping the word Carriage) for a long long time, even into the advent of word processors and later the computer keyboards of the 70's and 80's and maybe even the early 90's.  But then a break in tradition happened... For some reason they stopped Labeling that key as: "Return" and changed its label to: "Enter".  Where the heck did they get that word from?  Why didn't they choose to call it "New Line" instead?  The only hint we have of the key's ancestry is that they usually include a graphic of a bottom left turn arrow symbolizing the right to left motion of your forearm as it performs the ancient ritual. -dbs