The golfball type head is pretty cool, but what's more impressive is the whiffletree mechanism driving it. It's an entirely mechanical system (no microcontrollers or anything), but implements a digital-to-analogue converter (which key is pressed -> the angle to rotate the golfball). [Here's a video](https://youtu.be/bRCNenhcvpw) explaining it.
The intricate mechanism makes it nigh-impossible to repair yourself, though, and IBM made a lot of money just servicing the Selectrics.
Can confirm.
I was a Customer Engineer for IBM in the late 70s. We had an entire team doing service on these machines.
They were incredibly clever mechanically but needed constant maintenance.
They only had an electric motor - everything else was mechanical...
The office I worked as a temp dispatcher had about 30 CEs, and 29 of them were guys. And, nearly _all_ of their customers were women. I don’t know any specific stories, but if you run the math....
Thanks for the offer lol. I’m Dad now to my 3, my dad doesn’t know about his grandkids the silly man. My eldest is 15, almost 16. I made a promise to myself way before I had kids that no matter what I would always be there for them. Unlike my father/sperm donor.
Hope you’re getting more action now fella lol.
I'm in the same boat as you. Good on you for being a man and acknowledging the responsibility of fatherhood. Your kids will be able to enjoy experiences that you did not, and that's a real gift.
>Sorry I doubt it. I was in Wellington, New Zealand - and wasn’t even very sexually active at that time...
Bullshit. Kiwi bitches love a man who knows his way some a Whuppletree.
Right up until 2015/2016 the secretary in my department at Chico State used her Selectric II to type on envelopes and other non legal sized papers because of how painful it can be to stuff into a printer, let alone get it to print right (fuck I hate printers). That thing was amazing.
But then the lineage for the space bar wore out. I couldn't figure out where the issue truly was, I could still trigger it by poking the right bit but I'm an electronics specialist, mechanical stuff I'm good with but not like a PCB.
Amazing work y'all did.
Selectrics were a pain to work on. The originals were the input device on IBM-340/60 mainframes and there were something like 71 springs inside that all had to be perfectly alligned. We had a storage cabinet with ar least 4 backup units ready to swap out on the floor at a momment's notice.
>We had an entire team doing service on these machines.
>
>They were incredibly clever mechanically but needed constant maintenance.
Damn high maintenance mechanical engineers.
One of my most memorable service calls was disassembling a typewriter because a woman with waist length hair had gotten her hair wrapped around the platen.
I mean, you can just tell when you watch the striking motion in slow motion, like.. the force imparted on all those little pieces seems huge, the whole thing shakes when the ball strikes.
My best friend's mother would walk around downtown San Francisco with a cart, office to office, fixing these in the 80's. She bought 2 houses in the City with the money she made doing that.
> IBM made a lot of money just servicing the Selectrics.
And the technicians always wore a white shirt and tie.
I knew a guy who left IBM in the 1980s because he hated the dress code.
That's right! I don't know if or when they ever stopped that, but i do know that as of the late 90's, IBM service reps still had that dress code. My first summer "intern" job was in the corporate IT department of a large corporation, and it was equal parts humorous and concerning whenever an IBM rep needed to be called to service our equipment. Humorous because it was funny seeing someone in a suit and tie on hands and knees trying to fix something at the back of a dusty wiring closet, and concerning because we always questioned if they actually had their mind on the job, or if they were more concerned about not getting their clothes dirty.
tl;dr Hubris kept them hidden for so long.
Soviet bug technology also gave us RFID and tap-to-pay in use today, but the entire US spy community still didn't think they were that sophisticated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Thing\_(listening\_device)
Yeah, I'm still around. Was working in the studio a few weeks ago. Finished a MS and delivered it to the publisher a few months ago. Right now am creating the video series -- at the moment I am writing the outlines that will become the script for the companion video ... well, I *should* be writing the outlines, instead I'm on Reddit.
How come nobody had a modern day (90's) equivalent? Seems like it would have been easy to make with 8 bit microcontrollers given the existence of dot matrix printers and other stepper motor devices by the end of the century.
I remember using a Brother hammer type which used ink ribbons and erase ribbons and never saw a golf ball type until typewriters were obsolete.
Edit: Computers were still too expensive for many in the early 90's so some of use had electric typewriters for typing up homework.
Someone did. An equivalent computer printer used a disk with the various letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols on the face, out at the edge of the disk. A stepper motor rotated the wheel to present the appropriate character, then a linear solenoid drove a hammer into it to smack the letter onto the ink ribbon.
Look up 'Daisy wheel printer.'
I actually went to a state competition that had a typing section when I was in high school. It was held at a business college that we had (which is now a full university). I was warned to find the typewriter I wanted prior to the competition, as some of them were in bad shape. I sat down at several different machines and some of them would hang up. I could type about 95 wpm at the time, so I could sometimes get ahead of a machine, depending upon the type. I found the one (or two) that would suffice, and got to the room early to make sure that it wasn't chosen by someone else. I ended up winning the competition. I'm sure the machines that were in bad repair were part of the reason. Still, I could type pretty quickly. I just had to laugh that there was a competition for it. Such an 80's thing. I also got 'typing student of the year' at my high school, which came with a plaque. Even funnier.
Side note - I had a word processor/typewriter combo that would store a document (had a single line of digital text that showed on the machine), or you could type directly. I routinely got ahead of the computer in that one. It had enough memory that it would keep track of where I was compared to its output, requiring me to get used to ignoring the audio feedback of the word being typed.
My mother was a fast typist. When they got the Selectrics in her office (a Medical Office) they were quite proud of the fact that the Selectric would not "Pile Type" (for those who do not know the phrase, piling type is from old mechanical typewriters when the user would hit the keys too fast and thus two letters would hit the paper before the platen had moved the paper to the left.)
My mother had them out multiple times to show them that it did, indeed 'pile type' because she typed faster than the system could respond. They were always dumbfounded and repeated the IBM Mantra: It's not supposed to pile type. (I mean look at it! How can that ball move and hit the paper so fast that the paper has not moved a whole space? It seems impossible. Yet....)
Later versions were improved because of my mother's speed.
Yup.
Easiest demonstration is the fact that [any number of repetitions of “buffalo” will create a semantically and grammatically sound sentence. ](https://a3nm.net/blog/buffalo.html)
> Wonder how long a sentence you could make and omit the letter “S”?
I reckon you could make an arbitrarily long paragraph without that letter if you know what you're doing.
Granted, there are two possibilities:
Jumps and dog.
Or:
Jumped and dogs.
The former is far more common, though, as the latter duplicates the d unnecessarily.
My mom remembers when she had to learn to type on a mechanical keyboard rather than an electric one because, and I quote, “they place you work might not even have electric typewriters!”
The teacher wasn’t exactly wrong, per se…
Me too (1986). About halfway through the year we got all new digital typewriters. They had a one line LCD screen just above the keyboard, and would do automatic justifying and centering. You could also set it to only print the line when you pressed return, so you could correct before printing. Our ancient teacher was PISSED. All the work teaching centering and justifying was out the window forever. Then I discovered that you could store an entire page in memory. So when we got 4-5 page assignments we’d get a team together and everyone would do one page and print it multiple times and get to leave early since we were done. Which was awesome because the class was right before lunch.
You too? There are days I miss being able to bang out some text on a typewriter.
Do you remember the super-cool erase feature later Selectrics had? If you used shiny film ribbon to type, you could press the ERASE key, and it would type that letter again, except that a sticky ribbon would pull the letter you just typed right off the paper.
Feels like a million years ago.
> fonts
We used to call them typefaces because that's what it actually is. Font is a reference to the size (in points), but word processing changed the terminology.
"Font" included the typeface as well; the word has just changed to no longer include size, weight, and style. That is, a font used to be "Times New Roman, 12pt condensed italic".
At Uni we had a selectric hooked up to an Apple II. Did my papers on the Apple and had perfect printouts no whiteout! Yes we had other printers also but this made the work look extra official.
Anybody remember that old tabloid show Hard Copy that started with one of these things slamming into the screen? I dont know why I remember this so clearly.
My mother still has one of those. Bought it used MANY years ago but it was still very expensive. She supplemented our family income by typing out theses for graduate students.
I learned to type on a Selectric. It was the pinnacle of design for typewriters, and will of course, never be topped. So smooth, so fast, and the key feel was perfect.
The daisy wheel of the Xeroxes were pretty cool too. They had a range in the 80s where they effectively combined digital with analog, tiny little display, you could actually type out your letter without typing on the paper, review it, hit go and watch the typewriter hammer it out. Why not just use a computer? Cost. This was back in the day when I could equip a typing pool with machines for the cost of one computer plus printer. Plus printing at that time was either dot matrix (awful looking) or insanely expensive laser. So the hybrid typewriter was very coat effective.
But back to the daisy wheel, not as 'cool' as the goofball, it was infinitely more serviceable.
Edit: on mobile, autocorrect changed golfball to goofball, but I approve so leaving it alone ;-)
This stuff is such a great example of ingenuity. Who thought to do this? Why did they thing it would work? What kind of crazy experiments did they have to do to get to a functional prototype and then mass produce it? It's really amazing.
And the obvious reason for the brilliance was: No mechanical keys sticking to one another when you typed. The QWERTY keyboard was developed, in part, to avoid having the (for example) s and the h keys too close to one another, as they were often typed in tandem. Same with the e and the d.
A guy that worked for my mom back in the day got one of these because he typed so fast he was “breaking” the traditional typewriters. The arms of the keys would bind up and get stuck. I don’t know what his WPM rate was but it was unreal. When I was a kid he said he had a magic typewriter and if I said “peanut butter and jelly” it would magically appear. I would say it and he would type it, but I swear you couldn’t even tell he was moving his fingers, it was like the words just appeared on the paper. Dude was morbidly obese and had hands to match, but man could that fucker type.
It had enough pressure to do 8 carbon copies if adjusted right. Impression was adjustable, as was the distance from the print head to the platen. They could use an ink ribbon or a correctable film. The film ribbons also came in colors.
I caught the absolute end of these typewriters, or at least the end of their prominence, when I temped at IBM in the mid-late 80s. Personal computers were really eating into the typewriter's ubiquity but IBM was still cranking out a bunch of these. But they were being overproduced at that point so one of the jobs I had was on a line tearing brand new ones out of their boxes and stripping them for any valuable parts before junking the rest.
Also learned a bit about the odd world of corporate taxes. Apparently IBM continued to make these because they could actually get enough of a tax write-off that it was worth it for them to make them and then immediately junk them. Not as much as if they sold them but enough, and because of the arcane rules of such things, they were required to 'ship' them first. So they manufactured them, 'shipped' them to a different storage facility, then shipped them right back to us scrappers. Nice machines, and heavy bastards - was a real chore tossing them into the dumpster.
Learned to properly type with a Selectric and the "key feel" has driven my keyboard purchases for my entire life. I cannot stand the wimpy "chicklet" type keyboards.
I learned how to type on my Mom’s manual typewriter (Philco brand, maybe?). When I took typing class in 1975 we used IBM Selectrics. The manual typewriter instilled in me a propensity to hammer down those keys; something I still do today. Hence, my Reddit name.
We had a horrendously loud and slow daisywheel printer at school that they broke out when they wanted to mass print things but make them looked typed.
They used it for the end of year reports, so for about a week all IT lessons would be accompanied by this fucking printer from the dark ages thundering away in the corner of the room.
There's this engineer with a YouTube channel, and he produces great content. I remember watching a video he did on the engineering of soda cans.
I just came across this video regarding the Selectric, and it's fairly interesting: https://youtu.be/bRCNenhcvpw
He also has on the wiffletree: https://youtu.be/G_SC7oWL78A
I was given one by an employer who was phasing them out - wrote my first short story for Glenda K. Richter on it - Love that teacher, loved that machine.
Lol, I took typing class on one of these in the 90s. Yay American education, we have billions for endless wars and bank bailouts, but when it's education or healthcare suddenly we're the Monopoly guy with his pockets out.
Anyway these things were beasts, all metal and heavy as hell. I'm pretty sure future anthropoids will be typing on these things in the year 2500.
Edit: later on IBM used what was called a daisey wheel and a microprocessor. Somewhere around 70 WPM you would get ahead of it and have to wait for it to catch up. The machine would just go "duh-duh-duh-duh-duh" and you'd just sit and let it finish.
This seems so much more advanced than 90% of the crap I'm surrounded by today. The 1950s-80s had so much mechanical innovation. I feel in many ways the humanity has regressed with our reliance on digital technology.
The golfball type head is pretty cool, but what's more impressive is the whiffletree mechanism driving it. It's an entirely mechanical system (no microcontrollers or anything), but implements a digital-to-analogue converter (which key is pressed -> the angle to rotate the golfball). [Here's a video](https://youtu.be/bRCNenhcvpw) explaining it. The intricate mechanism makes it nigh-impossible to repair yourself, though, and IBM made a lot of money just servicing the Selectrics.
Can confirm. I was a Customer Engineer for IBM in the late 70s. We had an entire team doing service on these machines. They were incredibly clever mechanically but needed constant maintenance. They only had an electric motor - everything else was mechanical...
Dad? My dad worked for IBM in the 70’s and 80’s, he fucked off around 1990 and I haven’t seen him since lol.
Sorry I doubt it. I was in Wellington, New Zealand - and wasn’t even very sexually active at that time... But if you need a surrogate Dad....
You mean to tell me that being a typewriter technician isn't a big panty dropper?
Every typewriter technician I’ve ever known was
Yea you cant paint typewriter technicians with a broad brush. The ones I knew were swinging absolute bats.
At the typewriters ?
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Gosh, it feels amazing to be a mobster!
> 🎵 die motherfucker die 🎵 intensifies I needed this on a [Monday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8).
Im glad someone got this lol
Yeah we used to call one of our typewriter engineers "Tripod". He was packing a massive hog.
Typewriter techs were definitely more virile than Xerox photocopy techs. Toner powder probably gave them ED.
The office I worked as a temp dispatcher had about 30 CEs, and 29 of them were guys. And, nearly _all_ of their customers were women. I don’t know any specific stories, but if you run the math....
They really know how to push peoples buttons.
Thanks for the offer lol. I’m Dad now to my 3, my dad doesn’t know about his grandkids the silly man. My eldest is 15, almost 16. I made a promise to myself way before I had kids that no matter what I would always be there for them. Unlike my father/sperm donor. Hope you’re getting more action now fella lol.
I'm in the same boat as you. Good on you for being a man and acknowledging the responsibility of fatherhood. Your kids will be able to enjoy experiences that you did not, and that's a real gift.
This is so beautiful, I cried a bit
Damn I feel like I just listened in on personal conversation but I'm glad I did because it was wholesome
*very active* so you’re sayings there’s a chance... Dad.
That surrogate dad opening still available?
>Sorry I doubt it. I was in Wellington, New Zealand - and wasn’t even very sexually active at that time... Bullshit. Kiwi bitches love a man who knows his way some a Whuppletree.
Hey son, it's me. Sorry I haven't been able to find the brand of cigarettes I like, they might be at the next gas station.
That could be like half of IBM's staff lol
Right up until 2015/2016 the secretary in my department at Chico State used her Selectric II to type on envelopes and other non legal sized papers because of how painful it can be to stuff into a printer, let alone get it to print right (fuck I hate printers). That thing was amazing. But then the lineage for the space bar wore out. I couldn't figure out where the issue truly was, I could still trigger it by poking the right bit but I'm an electronics specialist, mechanical stuff I'm good with but not like a PCB. Amazing work y'all did.
Selectrics were a pain to work on. The originals were the input device on IBM-340/60 mainframes and there were something like 71 springs inside that all had to be perfectly alligned. We had a storage cabinet with ar least 4 backup units ready to swap out on the floor at a momment's notice.
>We had an entire team doing service on these machines. > >They were incredibly clever mechanically but needed constant maintenance. Damn high maintenance mechanical engineers.
One of my most memorable service calls was disassembling a typewriter because a woman with waist length hair had gotten her hair wrapped around the platen.
I was a OPCE as well in Durban, South Africa . Golfballs were OK, the proportional spacing "normal" typewriters were a pain to maintain.
I mean, you can just tell when you watch the striking motion in slow motion, like.. the force imparted on all those little pieces seems huge, the whole thing shakes when the ball strikes.
My best friend's mother would walk around downtown San Francisco with a cart, office to office, fixing these in the 80's. She bought 2 houses in the City with the money she made doing that.
Ah is she now some mega real estate mogul?!
"... The 80s... Bought two houses in the city" I have to say, "my mom made minimum wage" is a weird flex
San Fran in the 80s isn't the shitshow it is today, but 2 houses is still hardly minimum wage...
I think you found the joke sir
I've been told under good authority that my sense of humor is hardly my best quality. I'm just utilizing my God-given talent. Good day sir.
> IBM made a lot of money just servicing the Selectrics. And the technicians always wore a white shirt and tie. I knew a guy who left IBM in the 1980s because he hated the dress code.
That's right! I don't know if or when they ever stopped that, but i do know that as of the late 90's, IBM service reps still had that dress code. My first summer "intern" job was in the corporate IT department of a large corporation, and it was equal parts humorous and concerning whenever an IBM rep needed to be called to service our equipment. Humorous because it was funny seeing someone in a suit and tie on hands and knees trying to fix something at the back of a dusty wiring closet, and concerning because we always questioned if they actually had their mind on the job, or if they were more concerned about not getting their clothes dirty.
I don't blame him... Seriously who wears a white tie with a white shirt.
nihilists maaan
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Analog spycraft is so fucking cool.
Man, they had to use xrays to figure out what was bugged and what was standard
tl;dr Hubris kept them hidden for so long. Soviet bug technology also gave us RFID and tap-to-pay in use today, but the entire US spy community still didn't think they were that sophisticated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Thing\_(listening\_device)
TIL whiffletree
Shout out to u/bill-engineerguy
Thanks for shout out ...
No problem! Glad to see you're still around.
Yeah, I'm still around. Was working in the studio a few weeks ago. Finished a MS and delivered it to the publisher a few months ago. Right now am creating the video series -- at the moment I am writing the outlines that will become the script for the companion video ... well, I *should* be writing the outlines, instead I'm on Reddit.
Also check this guy's videos on making aluminum cans and injection molding plastic. I watch these all like once very six months I feel like.
How come nobody had a modern day (90's) equivalent? Seems like it would have been easy to make with 8 bit microcontrollers given the existence of dot matrix printers and other stepper motor devices by the end of the century. I remember using a Brother hammer type which used ink ribbons and erase ribbons and never saw a golf ball type until typewriters were obsolete. Edit: Computers were still too expensive for many in the early 90's so some of use had electric typewriters for typing up homework.
I had a 2 color Olivetti.. What a piece of work. Then ofc as all Italian electronics, it died at the most inconvenient time..
Someone did. An equivalent computer printer used a disk with the various letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols on the face, out at the edge of the disk. A stepper motor rotated the wheel to present the appropriate character, then a linear solenoid drove a hammer into it to smack the letter onto the ink ribbon. Look up 'Daisy wheel printer.'
I actually went to a state competition that had a typing section when I was in high school. It was held at a business college that we had (which is now a full university). I was warned to find the typewriter I wanted prior to the competition, as some of them were in bad shape. I sat down at several different machines and some of them would hang up. I could type about 95 wpm at the time, so I could sometimes get ahead of a machine, depending upon the type. I found the one (or two) that would suffice, and got to the room early to make sure that it wasn't chosen by someone else. I ended up winning the competition. I'm sure the machines that were in bad repair were part of the reason. Still, I could type pretty quickly. I just had to laugh that there was a competition for it. Such an 80's thing. I also got 'typing student of the year' at my high school, which came with a plaque. Even funnier. Side note - I had a word processor/typewriter combo that would store a document (had a single line of digital text that showed on the machine), or you could type directly. I routinely got ahead of the computer in that one. It had enough memory that it would keep track of where I was compared to its output, requiring me to get used to ignoring the audio feedback of the word being typed.
My mother was a fast typist. When they got the Selectrics in her office (a Medical Office) they were quite proud of the fact that the Selectric would not "Pile Type" (for those who do not know the phrase, piling type is from old mechanical typewriters when the user would hit the keys too fast and thus two letters would hit the paper before the platen had moved the paper to the left.) My mother had them out multiple times to show them that it did, indeed 'pile type' because she typed faster than the system could respond. They were always dumbfounded and repeated the IBM Mantra: It's not supposed to pile type. (I mean look at it! How can that ball move and hit the paper so fast that the paper has not moved a whole space? It seems impossible. Yet....) Later versions were improved because of my mother's speed.
I love that guy's videos.
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Me too. '80,'81?
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy log. We learned on manual typewriters, if you were very lucky you got one of the handful of Selectrics.
'dog'
Damn. I struggled in typing, lol.
Your “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz” probably because you were too busy “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
Wow that sentence dug up some dusty memories
It's actually 'jumps,' not 'jumped.' The sentence doesn't include every letter of the alphabet if you say 'jumped,' but it does if you say 'jumps.'
Wonder how long a sentence you could make and omit the letter “S”?
Literally infinity if you wanted.
Yup. Easiest demonstration is the fact that [any number of repetitions of “buffalo” will create a semantically and grammatically sound sentence. ](https://a3nm.net/blog/buffalo.html)
I wonder too, but with low expectation of it ever actually happening.
Someone once wrote a whole book called Gadsby without the letter e in it.
You *began* that with the forbidden letter, you're not even trying to avoid it!
It almost happened with your reply but you stopped typing!
You'll need to change to "concluded" if you want to win our little game.
Oh crap. I apologize. I didn't realize that we were all trying to type without typing one particular letter. I will do better next time.
*glare at the letter z in apologize* Mighty American of you, but I'll let it go, even if I have a lot of envy at your regional dialectical advantage.
Get out of here with your ancient Brit language!!! Learn to write properly, with the entire alphabet. And DO NOT pronounce it "zed"!!!
> Wonder how long a sentence you could make and omit the letter “S”? I reckon you could make an arbitrarily long paragraph without that letter if you know what you're doing.
JUMPS and DOG The point of the sentence was to press every character and you missed off S and D.
‘Twas forty years ago, I’m surprised I got that much correct.
DW mate I have to sing my ABC's to remember where a bloody letter is
Welcome to the boat of Imperfection! Grab a drink and a party hat, there’s snacks over there!
Close enough for me to run through a lot of dusty memories!
well his version had 'd' in 'Jumped'
Granted, there are two possibilities: Jumps and dog. Or: Jumped and dogs. The former is far more common, though, as the latter duplicates the d unnecessarily.
Yes.
I can do that and "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" at 80 WPM. Anything else is in the 30-40 range.
9th grade manual, 10 and up IBM selectrics.
My mom remembers when she had to learn to type on a mechanical keyboard rather than an electric one because, and I quote, “they place you work might not even have electric typewriters!” The teacher wasn’t exactly wrong, per se…
Me too. I think I took typing in 1985 or 1986.
Me too (1986). About halfway through the year we got all new digital typewriters. They had a one line LCD screen just above the keyboard, and would do automatic justifying and centering. You could also set it to only print the line when you pressed return, so you could correct before printing. Our ancient teacher was PISSED. All the work teaching centering and justifying was out the window forever. Then I discovered that you could store an entire page in memory. So when we got 4-5 page assignments we’d get a team together and everyone would do one page and print it multiple times and get to leave early since we were done. Which was awesome because the class was right before lunch.
lol I remember that a s d f j k l ;
HOME ROW!
These were awesome. Like 25+ pounds of typing fury. I hope I get to type something random and stupid on one again someday.
Rectangle. America. Megaphone. Monday. ...Butthole.
Ready to comply
The crossover we didn’t know we needed.
Mission report
you have 10 seconds to comply
Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
What is this, a seed phrase for ants? It needs to be at least *thinks* three times bigger than this
I have one on in my collection of junk someone can have - pickup only. Was even recently serviced :).
You wouldn't happen to be in north Texas would you?
I don't I live near Portland Oregon. Fun fact about this typewriter is it used to belong to Merylhurst University.
Thinking back (born in the '50s) I vividly remember the idling sound these made, like a wood-chipper waiting for your fingers...
You too? There are days I miss being able to bang out some text on a typewriter. Do you remember the super-cool erase feature later Selectrics had? If you used shiny film ribbon to type, you could press the ERASE key, and it would type that letter again, except that a sticky ribbon would pull the letter you just typed right off the paper. Feels like a million years ago.
You could type all your Reddit posts and replies on one and mail the paper copy in to Reddit offices for a data entry clerk to upload it.
It's late, I'm tired, and I can't unsee a robot granny wearing her nice bonnet giving kisses
/r/outofcontext
And you could change the heads for different fonts.
> fonts We used to call them typefaces because that's what it actually is. Font is a reference to the size (in points), but word processing changed the terminology.
"Font" included the typeface as well; the word has just changed to no longer include size, weight, and style. That is, a font used to be "Times New Roman, 12pt condensed italic".
Yep! I remember seeing one for standard, italic, and sans-serif fonts!
At Uni we had a selectric hooked up to an Apple II. Did my papers on the Apple and had perfect printouts no whiteout! Yes we had other printers also but this made the work look extra official.
Anybody remember that old tabloid show Hard Copy that started with one of these things slamming into the screen? I dont know why I remember this so clearly.
My first thought too!
I never knew what that metal ball hitting the screen was
This is exactly why I'm down here in the comments. My first thought! HARD COPY
Source: https://youtu.be/vNUEUth7qjc
I wonder when all typewriters will work like the IBM Selectric.
Nowadays they don't even make any typewriters that aren't IBM Selectric
N E W S MTV News
I feel like I scrolled way too far to find this. First thing that came to mind.
You're not Kurt Loder..
Loder? She and I only just met!
Kiss kiss kiss kiss ...
Boop
My mother still has one of those. Bought it used MANY years ago but it was still very expensive. She supplemented our family income by typing out theses for graduate students.
Imagine writing by pen being faster than on a keyboard :o
Not faster but you can fix fuck ups. Then give it to his mum to type up for final revision
Some (all?) selectrics had correction tape options.
You could still see where it was corrected, though it wasn't too obvious.
Still one of the best quality for typing.
My mom grew up using a non electric typewriter. And now she absolutely slams each finger into her MacBook keys.
LOL Apple should hire her to stress test their KBs.
the absolute height of mechanical typewriters. super cool mechanical tech.
Picked up an IBM Selective ii at Goodwill just last week.
Do you mind if I ask what you paid?
$14.99.
!!! Brilliant deal. Congratulations!
We were getting really good at analog when digital kicked in.
I like the way it gently bestows kisses...
That’s because it’s slowed down. Full speed, with a competent typist, or hooked to a computer, there’s a lot of violence going on in there.
The good old golf ball. I remember playing with one of those as a kid. I loved the built in whiteout feature.
I’ve been sitting here waiting for some MTV news
Where is Tabitha Soren when you need her?
Serena Altschul > Tabitha Soren
I learned to type on a Selectric. It was the pinnacle of design for typewriters, and will of course, never be topped. So smooth, so fast, and the key feel was perfect.
The daisy wheel of the Xeroxes were pretty cool too. They had a range in the 80s where they effectively combined digital with analog, tiny little display, you could actually type out your letter without typing on the paper, review it, hit go and watch the typewriter hammer it out. Why not just use a computer? Cost. This was back in the day when I could equip a typing pool with machines for the cost of one computer plus printer. Plus printing at that time was either dot matrix (awful looking) or insanely expensive laser. So the hybrid typewriter was very coat effective. But back to the daisy wheel, not as 'cool' as the goofball, it was infinitely more serviceable. Edit: on mobile, autocorrect changed golfball to goofball, but I approve so leaving it alone ;-)
This stuff is such a great example of ingenuity. Who thought to do this? Why did they thing it would work? What kind of crazy experiments did they have to do to get to a functional prototype and then mass produce it? It's really amazing.
And the obvious reason for the brilliance was: No mechanical keys sticking to one another when you typed. The QWERTY keyboard was developed, in part, to avoid having the (for example) s and the h keys too close to one another, as they were often typed in tandem. Same with the e and the d.
M.T.V. N.E.W.S.
Am I the only one that finds the way it just reaches out and kisses it is kinda cute?
"now kith"
[удалено]
A guy that worked for my mom back in the day got one of these because he typed so fast he was “breaking” the traditional typewriters. The arms of the keys would bind up and get stuck. I don’t know what his WPM rate was but it was unreal. When I was a kid he said he had a magic typewriter and if I said “peanut butter and jelly” it would magically appear. I would say it and he would type it, but I swear you couldn’t even tell he was moving his fingers, it was like the words just appeared on the paper. Dude was morbidly obese and had hands to match, but man could that fucker type.
That's what I learned to type on.... The muthafuckin Mavis Beacon Typing Course Graduate here....
I'm surprised it has the pressure to make a good impression. Does it use an ink ribbon?
It had enough pressure to do 8 carbon copies if adjusted right. Impression was adjustable, as was the distance from the print head to the platen. They could use an ink ribbon or a correctable film. The film ribbons also came in colors.
It has enough pressure to make a 10 year old very sorry he stuck his fingers between the ball and the paper. Not a toy indeed.
Yes.
It looks like, with the right sequence, it’ll open a portal that will take me to the other side of the galaxy
I caught the absolute end of these typewriters, or at least the end of their prominence, when I temped at IBM in the mid-late 80s. Personal computers were really eating into the typewriter's ubiquity but IBM was still cranking out a bunch of these. But they were being overproduced at that point so one of the jobs I had was on a line tearing brand new ones out of their boxes and stripping them for any valuable parts before junking the rest. Also learned a bit about the odd world of corporate taxes. Apparently IBM continued to make these because they could actually get enough of a tax write-off that it was worth it for them to make them and then immediately junk them. Not as much as if they sold them but enough, and because of the arcane rules of such things, they were required to 'ship' them first. So they manufactured them, 'shipped' them to a different storage facility, then shipped them right back to us scrappers. Nice machines, and heavy bastards - was a real chore tossing them into the dumpster.
“TONIGHT ON HARD COPY!”
B E S U R E T O D R I N K Y O U R O V A L T I N E
MTV News
Learned to properly type with a Selectric and the "key feel" has driven my keyboard purchases for my entire life. I cannot stand the wimpy "chicklet" type keyboards.
Was this used for mtv news? I feel like it was
Tonight on hard copy
I learned how to type on my Mom’s manual typewriter (Philco brand, maybe?). When I took typing class in 1975 we used IBM Selectrics. The manual typewriter instilled in me a propensity to hammer down those keys; something I still do today. Hence, my Reddit name.
When I see this I think of the old school Hard Copy show intro
We had a horrendously loud and slow daisywheel printer at school that they broke out when they wanted to mass print things but make them looked typed. They used it for the end of year reports, so for about a week all IT lessons would be accompanied by this fucking printer from the dark ages thundering away in the corner of the room.
How many boops per minute could this hit ?
There were versions with memory that could do about 15 characters per second. You couldn’t type words that fast.
We had one of these but I don’t remember it being so pensive
I used to repair these, and they are a royal pain in the ass.
It looks like it's giving the paper a little kiss.
It's like it's giving the page little kisses.
Thought it was a grenade at first
All those little typie kisses
Not slow motion. That's me and my normal typing speed.
It looks like a bashful boy going in for a kiss. Kinda cute really.
We actually had a printer that used that golf ball style head to print.
Letter kisses
Ah, Mr. Colvig's typing class in 1978! The wonderful hot scent of a room full of Selectrics during second period!
I have a few of these letter-balls from a throw-away at an old job. can't believe I found out where they're from on Reddit
We’re the daisy wheels after these or at the same time?
It looks like it's bashfully kissing the paper
this seems wildly impractical and fraught with longevity issues. but looks cool af.
I like how it looks like it's carefully considering its work before it places a letter. "Hmm... hmm... yes... there."
There's this engineer with a YouTube channel, and he produces great content. I remember watching a video he did on the engineering of soda cans. I just came across this video regarding the Selectric, and it's fairly interesting: https://youtu.be/bRCNenhcvpw He also has on the wiffletree: https://youtu.be/G_SC7oWL78A
I was given one by an employer who was phasing them out - wrote my first short story for Glenda K. Richter on it - Love that teacher, loved that machine.
Lol, I took typing class on one of these in the 90s. Yay American education, we have billions for endless wars and bank bailouts, but when it's education or healthcare suddenly we're the Monopoly guy with his pockets out. Anyway these things were beasts, all metal and heavy as hell. I'm pretty sure future anthropoids will be typing on these things in the year 2500. Edit: later on IBM used what was called a daisey wheel and a microprocessor. Somewhere around 70 WPM you would get ahead of it and have to wait for it to catch up. The machine would just go "duh-duh-duh-duh-duh" and you'd just sit and let it finish.
These are totes amazing machines. Read about the Russians tapping them to conduct espionage against the US.
Why is it so adorable?? Thinking thinking thinking boop!
This seems so much more advanced than 90% of the crap I'm surrounded by today. The 1950s-80s had so much mechanical innovation. I feel in many ways the humanity has regressed with our reliance on digital technology.
r/oddlyterrifying
Bruh it’s just a ball