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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!]
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dondi

Yes, mine was actually a Correcting Selectric II. I bought the system to use at work, because the small company I worked for wouldn't buy a computer, and we needed one to integrate the purchase of another company (e.g. a database of part number correspondences and inventory, quickly generated and changed procedures, etc.). It wasn't long before every body was using it, including the finance department which wouldn't buy one - when I was managing our British subsidiary, I noticed that the consolidated financials were being done on Visicalc! [When I was in England, I retained my office in Boston, with the computer and all my files.] They were even keeping our patient database on it, printing out monthly reports for doctors. But the Selectric allowed us to generate typed master procedures, with a revision history, as well as correspondence, and I did all my manual typing on it as well.

patsquire

Then they developed the Correcting Selectric, which revolutionized how we handled typing errors, AND THEN - - - TA-DAAAA - - the ultimate typewriter of all time:

IBM Correcting Selectric II

It was all downhill after the Correcting Selectric II. The Correcting Selectric III was a real step backwards. Typewriting had hit its peak. Ah, the memories........................

bbandit

I started with IBM in 1965 when I got out of the Army. They had just introduced the Selectric. What a revolution. Later, they hooked it to a magnetic tape storage unit and named it the MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter). It was, in essence, the first word processor. Once you typed your letter, you could load a single sheet of paper, hit playback, and reprint and original copy (as many as you wanted one page at a time).

Wish I had had one of those when I was in the service. Every letter we typed was seven copies (original plus six onion skin copies using carbon paper). It took half a day to make a correction if you made a mistake.

dondi

I can imagine that typing equations would be a real challenge - it's not trivial today, even with specialized computer fonts and printers! I can only imagine how they managed things like Sigma and the Integral sign, which spanned multiple lines!

Oh gosh this brings back memories. The IBM Selectric typewriter with its interchangeable type balls! I remember working with one in the Northwestern chemistry department back in 1972 that had elements with mathematical and chemical symbols on them. Boy, was that a challenge. I remember once taking an entire day to type one equation.

Yes, definitely offer this on eBay. Someone will want it.

433

thanks for sharing the whole story. it was great! bright spot on saturday morning...lol

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