This allowed from two to five units of space per letter and produced material that simulated the appearance of a printed page. In 1944 they announced the first IBM Executive typewriter with proportional spacing.
IBM engineers spent years researching, developing and perfecting a mechanism that would measure each alphabetical character in units. In 1941 IBM announced a radical breakthrough in typewriter technology. A consensus of typewriter opinion in 1933 would not have suggested that it was the right time to introduce an electric machine. Other similar electric experiments had ended in disaster. Northeast had taken its pilot models from an inventor, James Smathers of KansasCity who had been working on them since 1914. In 1933 IBM entered the electric typewriter field by taking over Electromatic Typewriters Inc, previously a part of Northeast Electric Co., which had been struggling for a decade to add electricity to the standard office machine. Prices are for reference and not necessarily a “For Sale” price.Notes This machine is part of the demonstration collection of IBM and lexmark. By 1986 over 13 million Selectric typewriters had been sold. Sales grew quickly with some 80 thousand orders created by the end of 1961. These were so popular when they first came out that the sales forecast expected to only sell 60 or less, but ended up selling nearly 600. The keyboard was innovative and helped pave the way for the use of typewriter keyboards as the primary method for humans to interact with computers. It transformed the speed, accuracy and flexibility with which people could create typed documents. The IBM Selectric typewriter was the first of it’s kind, originally created back in 1961. When they work, they are fantastic! When they don’t they are a bear to fix. Some people even love these for writing stories, screen plays and more. Many people still use these for filling in forms in their businesses. The IBM Selectric III Correcting typewriter is by far one of the best industry work horses out there. Other than quieting down the machine a bit, it really served no other purpose.Īfter cleaning and adjusting the return spring mechanism, this IBM is working perfectly again. The ribbon carriage would fly to the right but not return unless pushed back.Īll the foam in this typewriter had turned to mush and was soaked with years of oil. This one is an example where the return and express wasn’t working. In 1973 a ribbon that could correct mistakes was created.
The Selectric III, was sold in the 80s with more advanced word processing capabilities and a 96-character printing element.īut by 1986 personal computers and daisy-wheel printers began to take over and the Selectric brand typewriter was retired. The Selectric 2 was released in 1971 with sharper corner and squarer lines and the ability to change the pitch from 10 to 12 characters per inch.
IBM TYPEWRITER CODE
The Selectric din’t get to speak ASCII, but uses a unique code base on the tilt and rotate command to be able to print. He pushed to get the Selectric typewriters to use 64 characters required for ASCII so it would be easier to convert Selectric typewriters for computer input. During prototype design, an IBM computer scientist Bob Berner had pioneered the creation of the American Standard Code for INformation Interchange, or ASCII which defines the characters used by computers. The golf ball contains the standard 44 typewriter characters. The interchangeable font idea wasn’t new and it’s writing that the IBM Selectrics took the concept from the Blickensderfer typewriter from the early 1900s. One of the main innovations to these typewriters is the golf-ball changeable typeface so different fonts could easily be swapped in and out.
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