Originally published at: Saturday Slow Mo: The IBM Selectric | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
I used to use these machines to type multi-copy forms which couldn’t be done on my word processor. I have to admit I miss them every now and then…
12 Likes
At school we had a room with 100 of them at desks, the sound of the entire collection at work was deafening. All materials had to be double spaced typed to be admissible. I learned to hen peck pretty fast, never did learn how to type…
9 Likes
12 Likes
Used one of those for a few years and loved it. Peak typewriter technology just as typewriters were about to become obsolete: no key jams, and you could re-insert a piece you’d already typed and expect the sheet to line up perfectly with what you’d already typed with no fiddly adjustments. My co-workers were amazed at how I could make it sing.
13 Likes
We had them on the ship because you could program them to type stuff that you needed to type all the time, like a return address, the huge number that identified the ship and our department on a requisition form, etc. They were heavy as an anchor - solid steel body and virtually indestructible. And you could easily switch from OCR to “regular” type face in about a second.
I can only imagine what they cost - whatever it was, it was worth it.
8 Likes
I got through school with a hand-me-down from my grandmother. It was the proverbial tank. I think I still have one or two of those type balls around here somewhere.
3 Likes
Think they were about $1,000 in, say, 1980.
7 Likes
Is that an APL typeball? Great memories of programming at a terminal on printer paper.
4 Likes
There was a small pavilion at the Seattle World’s Fair (1962) which featured a bunch of Selectrics for visitors to try out. What I remember most is that all the machines I tried would at odd times insert an extra character (I don’t remember if it was a space or a dash) in the middle of what you typed. I don’t know if this was true for all early Selectrics. It was years before I used one in an office and this didn’t happen on that machine.
3 Likes
It’d be nice to see it type something other than the same letter over and over.
4 Likes
Oof.
I love typewriters so damn much.
Came close to buying the first version of the Selectric to give it a whirl, but it wasn’t conducive to little baby’s nap time.
Still willing to shell out for my Swissa Piccola though…
The typewriter will never be obsolete, so long as young makers take the reins of the next gen of typewriter repair people.
3 Likes
I made a pretty good living in the late 70’s repairing typewriters, mostly Selectrics, for Tri-County Business Machines in Middlesex, NJ. Alas, they’re long gone now. No electronics at all, they were purely mechanical, and simply amazing. I’ve still got an IBM turning wheel somewhere. The turning wheel was used to manually cycle the system for repairs.
8 Likes
Music by Brian Eno
2 Likes
Agree on the engineering front. It’s pretty astounding with all those tiny rapidly moving parts that they didn’t break very often (in my experience).
2 Likes
The IBM 2741 Terminal was a Selectric plus a telephone interface. In 1970 I had one in my apartment in Providence (where I was teaching CS and doing R&D on the big IBM/360 mod 67 mainframe at Brown). My GF, now wife, had one in her apartment in Toronto where she was in grad school at U. of T. Both were connected via 1200 baud FX (Foreign Exchange) phone lines to a mainframe in Stamford CT where we were doing some contract programming together.
I hacked into the Stamford mainframe and added the ability for either of us to type a message and send it to the other, where it would ding the carriage return bell. I’ve always considered that to be an early example of email.
As a kind of dirty pleasure, I’d sometimes change the golf ball, dial up the Brown mainframe, and write APL code. Afterward I would wash my hands.
11 Likes
They’re pretty cool machines. I managed to break one of the very slender steel bands used to transmit the tilt-rotate code to the ball, when converting one to be a printer at the Byte Shop in 1978.
You should visit my brother’s website www.selectric.org to see what has become of the Selectric. A clue: not much.
13 Likes
At uni there was a large room dedicated to the general use of typewriters… dozens of them. Very convenient for me since I didn’t have a good typewriter at home. With that room fully occupied one day and needing access to a typewriter for a week or so, I rented an IBM Selectric from a repair business I knew of but had never visited. I recognized the gal running the business as the sister of a grade school bowling team buddy. It was then – via that rental, and later verified – that I found out Joe Torre was their uncle (the Atlanta Braves’ manager by then.) Six degrees of separation and all that.
I still stink at it.
4 Likes
Wow, if I didn’t already know that Selectrics were reliable workhorses, I’d think from the video of the bouncy, shaky looking mechanism in slow mo that there was no way they could work accurately or reliably - the nylon gears look like they would strip in minutes under that punishment.
2 Likes
