They called it a "typewriter"

Before PCs, laptops, tablets and all that, before Word or Google Docs, there was another way of creating documents, the typewriter! Typewritten documents first appear in the archival record of the college in the 1890s, but many records were still handwritten up to the WWI era. The typewriter shown here was discovered in the library store room, and is now in the archives. It is a manual typewriter, a Royal office model of mid 1960s vintage. In the 1970s manual typewriters became displaced by electrics, and they in their turn were replaced by PCs beginning in the early 1990s.

For decades though, when you needed to type up a paper, a memo, a letter or other document, this was what you used!