Super neat site!
You could get a Blackletter type ball for that thing. I had access to one in High School, with a shoebox of fonts.
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We used to have a mathematical symbol ball for it and the card that tells you where which keys are which symbols. Of course this reminds me of UFO where a terminal version (with the orator ball I believe) played a part in the opening credits.
I learned typing on both manual and IBM Selectric typewriters, back in the day. I could jam the Selectric by typing too fast.
The secret is, those gears aren’t nylon ^^ .
hi there…
you should meet rose pamperhyle
ooh your brothers website …so cool
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About what a CD burner cost then. Borrowed a Selectric from work once; damn heavy. I threw my back out carrying it and dropped it, but it still worked. Everything IBM made was well built, but heavy.
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Had one of them - briefly. Could never really get much use out of it cuz that fucking ball was so fascinating I’d get distracted and start watching the speedy ball and stop paying attention to what I was typing and then look up to see a big line of gibberish on the page. I’m jut wired that way - same reason I don’t ride bicycles any more. Fortunately I got my hands on an Apple II and now I’m just generally distracted all the time. That little ball is still really cool.
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If only somebody could build a gamer keyboard with Selectric keys instead of pale imitations of the original IBM PC keyboards… and of course a beefy haptic feedback system to replicate that satisfying chunka-chunka. And maybe a bell. (No idea what you’d do with a bell. But I still want one).
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My Mother worked for IBM for a while and one day brought an old Selectric home, along with three or four different ‘golf balls’ with different fonts. I suspect it was a used model being replaced at the office and she managed to persuade them not to throw it out. (Though, later, IBM did have a staff purchase scheme for used/refurbished kit, so maybe that was operating back then - 1970s.)
I found it fascinating, and did ‘play’ with it, later on, though I never really used it in anger. It is still an amazing piece of engineering and I was always impressed at the speed and ease of changing fonts in the middle of whatever you were writing.
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And here’s the (sort-of) Model-T version:
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I suspect it might not wobble so much if it was actually contacting the intended strike surface with all that force. There’s a lot of (intended) inertia in that system (looks like many here would remember the original use of CC [carbon copy sheets]).
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I learned to type on one of these in high school in the late Eighties. One on the most fun and surprisingly valuable classes that I took. Our class had at least fifty people in that room and it was loud. I recall the initial shock of making that ball dance alive.
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One more thing…
When my brother wanted to start a family team to compete in the National Underwater Robotics Contest, we needed to name it something. We chose The Typewriter Repairmen. Here’s a movie of our first robot, NotBob, repairing a Selectric underwater.
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This. is. amazing.
This is the content I come to BB for. What an unique past and memories, thanks for sharing!
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I typed on one of these for the first 5 years of my work life, in the mid-late 80s. They were unbelievable workhorses, and almost never broke down. The later model (the Selectric III, I believe) had a round flat key wheel instead of the globe, and was similarly reliable. IBM made amazing machines.
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I have a set of Modern Selectric keycaps (for standard Cherry-style mechanical switches) and it’s great! I have the black set but it was also available in period blue & black. The red set is freakish and fantastic.
A truly-Selectric-like keyboard would be bizarre for computers, but 60% mechanical keyboards are very similar and widely available. Shame there really aren’t any I can find with those huge Selectric spacebars.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_keycap_modern_selectric.html
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What you are suggesting would best be implemented by removing the printer from a Selectric and adding microswitches to read the tilt-rotate codes from the keyboard’s mechanical encoder bars. The motor’s job is to enforce the timing, by mechanically locking out the next keypress until the current one has been registered.
Unfortunately, I’m too old for that, and there’s about 10 useful computer keys missing from the layout.
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