Amazing new technology - interchangeable fonts!
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When I bought an electric typewriter to take to college, you had to choose your typeface and pitch when you bought it, since they were built into the keys and the mechanism. But the IBM Selectric changed that - in a mechanical tour de force, they designed a machine in which all the characters were on a ball; when you pressed a key, the ball spun and tilted to bring that character to the front and tap it against the paper - and it did that fast enough to keep up with most typists!
This meant that you could replace the ball with a different typeface, and they even accomplished the amazing feat of allowing different pitches - 10 or 12 characters per inch.
When I bought my first computer in 1980 (an Apple II+), it cost $10,000. There was no real microcomputer industry yet - my display was an actual video monitor, not a dedicated computer monitor, and half of what I spent went to two printers. One was a wide dot matrix printer (a Malibu 165) with several fonts and graphics capability (although you had to program the graphics; they didn't have built-in graphics yet). The other was a "letter-quality" printer - an IBM Selectric II which ran off the serial port, had a blue box to convert EBCDIC to ASCII, and sat on a tray of electronic actuators to operate the elements independent of the keyboard (although you could type on it, too); this setup had been developed for the government so they could auto-generate typed documents.
The typewriter is long gone, but during unpacking, I came upon my old box of elements. The card is something I generated to show samples of the type and provide an index. I think I'll be putting this up on eBay; maybe somebody's interested.
[When I think of how much I spent on that little computer with 64K memory, I still shudder. That's about $29,000 in 2014 money - think about what kind of computer you could get for that! And I wonder why I had that kind of money floating around - that was about half a year's salary! And if I'd put it in the stock market instead, it would be worth over $200K now - money I could certainly use!]
This meant that you could replace the ball with a different typeface, and they even accomplished the amazing feat of allowing different pitches - 10 or 12 characters per inch.
When I bought my first computer in 1980 (an Apple II+), it cost $10,000. There was no real microcomputer industry yet - my display was an actual video monitor, not a dedicated computer monitor, and half of what I spent went to two printers. One was a wide dot matrix printer (a Malibu 165) with several fonts and graphics capability (although you had to program the graphics; they didn't have built-in graphics yet). The other was a "letter-quality" printer - an IBM Selectric II which ran off the serial port, had a blue box to convert EBCDIC to ASCII, and sat on a tray of electronic actuators to operate the elements independent of the keyboard (although you could type on it, too); this setup had been developed for the government so they could auto-generate typed documents.
The typewriter is long gone, but during unpacking, I came upon my old box of elements. The card is something I generated to show samples of the type and provide an index. I think I'll be putting this up on eBay; maybe somebody's interested.
[When I think of how much I spent on that little computer with 64K memory, I still shudder. That's about $29,000 in 2014 money - think about what kind of computer you could get for that! And I wonder why I had that kind of money floating around - that was about half a year's salary! And if I'd put it in the stock market instead, it would be worth over $200K now - money I could certainly use!]
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