More than 15 years later, the Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer used a similar image of the typist who believed she would be a movie star to reveal the American dream as a rigged lottery that no one wins but everyone plays.
Then in August his wife, Grace, an unpopular 49-year-old former typist, began denouncing her in public.
His college offered to train him as a piano tuner, a lathe operator or a Braille shorthand typist.
And in contrast with many types of computer espionage, the process is simple, requiring only a cheap microphone and a desktop computer.Such snooping is possible because each key produces a characteristic click, shaped by its position on the keyboard, the vigour and hand position of the typist, and the type of keyboard used.
Others say it is simply stingy: a favourite case is that of a civilian air-force typist, not covered by the AFCS, who was awarded £484,000 for repetitive-strain injury in 2007, whereas under the AFCS total blindness in both eyes is worth just £402,500.
At one rally she asked, "why shouldn't I be president?"But few think the former typist, without liberation-war credentials, is made of the right stuff.
Furthermore, each new typist or keyboard required a fresh transcript and training session, limiting the method's appeal to would-be hackers.Now, in a blow to acoustic security, Doug Tygar and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have published details of an approach that reaches 96% accuracy, even without a labelled training transcript.
Thus schooled, the software could still identify only 80% of the characters in a different transcript of the same typist on the same machine.
In fact he came from the New York suburbs, and for two years between leaving the Velvet Underground in 1970 and making his first solo albums, helped by David Bowie, in 1972 he worked as a typist in his father's accountancy firm.
Automation also creates ways to monitor each office worker's efficiency: through computerized information, managers can, for example, count the number of times per hour that a typist strikes a letter on the keyboard.
Only one operator was necessary unlike Enigma, which typically involved three (a typist, a transcriber, and a radio operator).
