Domain: selectric.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to selectric.org.
Comments · 8
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Just played with one
My nephew showed up with a clean, original model M at robotics meting the other day. He might have gotten it from his dad, my twin brother, a fellow with way too many ancient IBM PCs. Like these.
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Re:Are all in one desktops now all known as iMacs?
Umm...seriously? And this one even has a built-in keyboard.
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Here's what it looks like
My brother has way too many old PCs and software. Here's a page with screenshots of all the old Widows stuff: http://www.selectric.org/winhist/index.html
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Re:Nixie Clock
My brother did this as part of his IBM XT media center PC. He added a 4 digit clock in one full-height 5" bay.
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It was my evil twin!
Actually, he's not evil at all. He's just into bigger engines than I am. http://www.selectric.org/ vs http://www.cathodecorner.com/
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The IMP 16 processor
was a bit of a curiosity. They did indeed use them in Sun engine analyzers. My brother has one of those if you'd like to see what a real National IMP 16 processor card looks like.
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Re:IBM Selectric and Executive
This guy's page has a link to a jpg where he has typed part of the 19 May 72 memo on an Executive. It does not look similar to the PDF.
The interword spaces on his Executive sample jpg are larger than those in the CBS PDF. If you look at the phrase "discussion opitions" in the jpg, you'll see there is at least enough room to fit the 'h' on the line underneath into the interword space. The single space is around the same size as a typical lower case letter like 'a', 'h', 'o', etc.
Whereas on the PDF, there are many places ("from now", "he can", etc.) where an 'h' clearly could not fit into the space. Perhaps few of these cases could be due to distortion of the document during copying/faxing/etc, but in general it is quite clear to me that the interword space is very consistently smaller on the PDF as compared to the Executive.
Also: on the Executive jpg, lowercase 'i', 'l', and 't' take up about 2/3 the horizontal distance of a letter like 'n' or 'o'. Whereas in the PDF memo, the ratio is more like only 1/2. Look at a word like 'options' ('opitions' in the jpg) to see this.
I'm just eyeballing it here so I could easily be wrong about my guesses of 1/2 and 2/3, but the point is that the horizontal proportions of the various letters in the typefaces systematically differ between the sample jpg and the PDF memo. And if you could order an Executive with a customized typebar in the 1960s or 1970s, I'd expect the spacing allotted to the characters would almost certainly still obey the same possible proportions of any other Executive. (1:2:3:4 or whatever.) Anything else would be a pretty significant design change.
So anyway, I doubt it was an Executive that typed it. Of course, you are free to suggest any of the various other proportional typewriters available at that time. e.g. the Selectric Composer (or whatever). -
Re:A few points....
Yeah. It's clear a lot of you guys don't remember typewriters, but the way you got superscript and subscript in general was to roll the platen up or down a half-line. The super- or sub-script would be the same size font, but offset.
You could get a superscript like that by changing the "element" (ie, the typeball). It was amazingly easy -- for 1972 -- as all you had to do was open the little clamp on top (usually meant breaking off a fingernail, even for males), digging the new element out, popping it on, closing the clamp, and then doing it again to go back.
Nobody bothered with this for the "th" in "11th".
According to the Selectric Museum, IBM never made a Times New Roman element. They're slashdotted to within an inch of their lives, but they've put up some static pages with the information you need.
In any case, though, as someone who typed a lot of this stuff in 69-73, I can tell you GI typewriters weren't IBM Executives. They were old-fashioned IBM C typewriters in black or green.
Maybe some PIO officer somewhere had an Executive, but not an ANG office in halfway-to-nowhere Texas.