OverType, a typewriter simulator on the web

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/12/overtype-a-typewriter-simulat.html
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@beschizza Missing the link.

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I can bang out pages of mostly not frustrating prose on my Remington Rand. A Selectric is a breeze, and has correction.

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Can’t check this from my phone, but I’d say it needs to have flying capitals to be a worthy simulator.

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The ability to use Special Elite typeface wins it points from me.

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Cute, but to make a dollar sign on a pre-computer typewriter, you used capitol S and I (the capitol i, dammed san-serif font). There was no pipe character on standard typewriters back then. Also, you made the UK Pound symbol with a lower case f and an upper case L.

I’ve got a portable Royal typewriter, probably from the late 40s in my closet, that I haven’t used since the 80s. Like the demo, you could change the ribbon from black to red with a flick of a switch. It also lacked a number “1”. You used a lowercase “L” instead.

Some of the best advice my Mother ever gave me was to take Typing in school. When I later was learning programming, I was miles ahead of the hunt-and-peckers.

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Not “simulator” enough! :frowning:

Most manual typewriters:

  • don’t have a 1 key (you use l instead).
  • don’t have a 0 key (you use O instead).
  • don’t have a ! key (you superimpose ' and .)
  • will let you superimpose if you hold down the spacebar

I also wish it would give some audible feedback when you’re typing too fast and jaming the hammers.

I am disappoint.

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i miss making typewriter soldiers

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Yeah, it would be great if you could see the levers striking the “page” whenever you hit a key. Also, most typewriters had a more obvious indicator of where the next letter would go. The red underline is kind of unrealistic.

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Oh, absolutely. It was a requirement in my high school to take typing before any of the “computer” classes. At the time, the computer classes were the responsibility of the business teacher, and frankly she really didn’t know what to do with them. I paid attention in typing and turned out to enjoy it, and I got rather good at it. When I finally got to the computer class, the programming she taught was COBOL, which wouldn’t run on the Apple IIe computers that we had. (So I taught myself BASIC.)

The upshot of this is that what I learned in the class I didn’t want, I use pretty much every day and was probably the single most useful class I had in high school. What I learned from the teacher in the programming class, I’ve never used, although I did continue to learn programming without her … so I learned two things from that class, albeit neither as the intention of the teacher.

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