The correcting feature of typewriters is not what I thought

[@TechnologyConnections]

I know, forgive me, the typewriter in the thumbnail ain't the one that does the correcting. It's just far prettier! It's also brown. Here's The Engineer Guy's great video on the Selectric: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mIOmf5ikncipptk

[@Nderak]

we want the coffeemaker

[@nickterooze]

To me it looks more like dark orange

[@jimurrata6785]

I miss Bill's videos. (yes I'm old enough to still call it carriage return instead of enter)

[@6581punk]

@@nickterooze Darn, beat me to it.

[@driftliketokyo34ftw35]

It is indeed prettier.

[@MsStLiz]

Just had one of those "floppy disk = save icon" moments where I realized that those little tabs you slide to adjust your margins in Word were once actual physical things on a typewriter.

[@majortom4543]

What about the shift buttons. You shift digitally to use capital letter or a number or a sign. Back then you shifted the mechanism

[@SolarShado]

Pretty sure they're still called "tab stops": the things that physically stop the carriage when you press the tab key. (I assume at least some typewriters supported multiple tab stops, though I've never actually seen one that fancy.)

[@marcokrueger3399]

I'm stunned by how I never questioned why it is called the "shift key". Now I know. Amazing!

[@DaimyoD0]

Same here! Also, I bizarrely had a conversation about skeuomorphs and keyboard layouts earlier today before watching this video. Edit: 12:27 I also had no idea that the standard 12 point font was based on the unit "characters per inch." Edit 2: Nevermind, they're totally unrelated! lmao Edit 3: For anyone wondering, skeuomorph is the term for a design element or appearance retained in a new version, like phone cameras making a shutter sound, etc. It is done not only for nostalgic and aesthetic reasons (Polaroid camera silhouette Instagram logo), but also as a sort of design language to expediate adoption of the new technology. For example, how keyboards don't need to be arranged like typewriters, but the configuration made the transition easier for typists, or how new computer users would know that a slider was for margin controls because it looks just like the slider used on a typewriter, or how audio production software UI sometimes uses virtual patch cables and dials. You could argue everything discussed so far in this (very fun) thread is a skeuomorph to some degree.

[@DaimyoD0]

@@marcokrueger3399 Another fun fact: capital letters are called "upper case" because they were stored in the higher of two cases while not being used on a printing press.

[@gudenau]

"The only thing better than perfect is standardized!" is an amazing quote.

[@jakeaurod]

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."

[@fuzzylon]

I remember a manager teaching me this. Basically, if you're going to do something the wrong way if you do all of it the same wrong way it will be easier to put right afterwards. I still like using standardised approaches for everything today.

[@mjasz4341]

When the standard is bad, it makes everything bad, and standards are hard to change, because they're "standard" which causes stagnation in innovation, because no one wants to change "the standard" standards are good for a lot of consumers, but not for everyone.

[@NenadKralj]

typewriters = (this was) so satisfying 🙂👍🏼

[@MrAranton]

The quote is amazing; however: The fact that the keys on a keyboard are staggered the way they are, is still useful. It helps with orienting yourself on the keyboard based on touch alone. Moving your finger from c to d or d to e feels different than moving from e to 3. It's not as relevant as the bumps on the f and the j key, but it is still useful, particularly with keyboards that have extra buttons above the F1-F12 line. Or if the keyboard is very compact and doesn't always sit in the same place, you'll feel that you're moving to the number before you see it on the screen.

[@TheInfiniteAmo]

"Destroying these ribbon cartridges was often a matter of national security!" Fun fact, the standard form for end-of-day security checks in military buildings in the U.S. still lists destroying typewriter ribbons as a necessary task.

[@judgedredd9236]

Probably they are still used in obscurity.

[@TamrenStarshadow]

@@judgedredd9236 They are actually. Probably no longer used by the government but there are definitely private companies that still do day to day business with typewriters. Look up a guy named Gilbert Michaels, he ran a big multimillion dollar scam to extort inflated prices for toner by pretending to be the supply companies businesses would normally order from. One of the reasons he got caught is he tried to scam a storage company that exclusively used typewriters to run their business. He was sentenced to four years in jail just a year ago and his scam dates back to the 1970s.

[@voxelsofsorrow]

@@judgedredd9236 you can't hack a typewriter! (well, actually you can, the Soviets put physical keyloggers in US Diplomats' Selectrics, MI5 used Tempest-like EM snooping through a phone tap to spy on an electromechanical cipher) but the Kremlin is said to still use typewriters to prevent hacking.

[@neutronenstern.]

easyest way to make it unreadable is to write some bullshit with it onto some reusable leather sheet again, i suppose

[@gordoncordon9779]

Hey, see im a busy guy, i dont have time to watch all of this... From what i gathered from the first 2 minutes, as well as this comment, i imagine the typewriters used those ribbons that transfer ALL the ink, this when the ribbon is rewound, the ink readheres to blank space, Am i right, am i wrong? Do i need to watch this whole video to find out, or is my assumption correct. Please i need to go on with my day!

[@GraniteGeek]

The Selectric was a glorious machine - the keys were so wonderfully balanced and positioned and the golfball so fast that I could hit 100 wpm on it in my typewriting prime. It's a great example of a technology reaching absolute perfection just as it becomes irrelevant.

[@kitefan1]

Yeah, I always wanted on when I was a student but couldn't afford the $1,000 to $2000 dollar equivalent price.

[@felisd]

I don't know if my mom had the Selectric, but she had one that was very similar. I had so much fun playing with that machine as a kid. Learning in this video that the "ink" was actually a polymer that stuck to the page was a total "aha" moment for me. I used to get so annoyed at how some of the pages I used to type for school would stick together after having been in my bag for a while, or if I put them in a plastic folder, sometimes, the letters would stick and transfer a little to the folder if left in my backpack with my textbooks. Now I know why it happened!

[@HJKelley47]

While employed at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit in the late 60s-70s, I worked on both the Selectric II and III. Typing speed was 130 WPM. I would love to secure another Selectric.

[@Jakepearl13]

My grandfather still has his selectrix and uses it for work. Because of this (and thanks to Tom hanks and his typewriter obsession),the selectrix is the machine I swear by

[@gaiaiulia]

I wanted a Selectric but the boss wouldn't spring for it. So I asked him for a proportionally spaced typewriter. It was three times the price. I got my Selectric. An absolutely amazing machine. The correction strip lifted the ink off the paper.

[@invisibledave]

When I was in middle school for typewriting class, they had removed the white-out strip so you couldn't undo things. I learned that the typewriter had an undo letter and an undo line feature. Since there was no white-out strip, if you hit undo, the keys would use the ink strip and make the letter on the paper. I then realized the ingenious thing about the undo line, I could use it to cheat. When the teacher made us sit and type the same long sentence over and over again while she walked around checking on us, I would just slowly type it the first time and then manually scroll the wheel down one notch and hit undo line. The typewriter would then re-type the entire line for me really fast. I would repeat these steps until I was at the end of the page. The teacher thought I was the fastest typer in the entire class. The trick was just to make sure to not make a mistake on the first line.

[@kellypg]

That's absolutely fantastic!

[@reinbeers5322]

I'm surprised it could store an entire line of text.

[@RCAvhstape]

The funny thing is that we used to have actual typing classes in school until at least the early 90s. In the military in the 1980s and early 90s, if you knew how to type you kept it to yourself because you'd get stuck filling out paperwork instead of doing whatever your job was supposed to be. The average person did not know how to type until suddenly everyone had a computer in their house.

[@kellypg]

@@RCAvhstape and we've now come full circle. Nobody uses a keyboard except PC gamers and old people without smart phones.

[@cetyl2626]

@@kellypg ya tell me about it, my elderly mother can do everything on her iPhone, but use a mouse on a computer, pft forget about it. "Son, what is double click"? Lol

[@rocbolt]

In high school there was a specific state sponsored college scholarship that *required* the application form to be filled out with a typewriter. Our school post-secondary counselor dug one out of storage for the dozen or so of us that wanted to apply to line up and use in the school office area. The whole afternoon teachers wandered by and were staggered by the anachronistic _tack tack tacking_ going on in the corner. And yay that was twenty years ago now! Wonder how long that typewriter requirement hung on, and how much it was the wishes of an eccentric millionaire vs a quirky test of ones ability to find and utilize disappearing hardware...

[@ObeliskDemon]

a military base required typewriter typed paperwork for a rebar company's deliveries 5 years ago so that requirement might still be there to this day

[@niyablake]

You could have cheated with a dot matrix printer

[@IceBergGeo]

Maybe it was a test of resourcefulness? If you can't figure this out, we don't want you.

[@spyone4828]

It was most likely a holdover: most computer printers kinda sucked for the first couple of decades. And inkjet printers tend to use water soluble inks. So they wanted to make sure submissions were readable and wouldn't lose data if they got rained on, and that means "typewritten". Eventually that will get updated to "fill out the PDF form on our website".

[@greenaum]

@@niyablake Nah, a daisywheel. Dot matrixes don't give that lovely crispness. They also don't give the characteristic blotches and splodges of a typewriter either, at least one with a fabric ribbon. Or else a laser printer. I defy this goofy college, whoever they were, to tell the difference, except laser printing looks better. Still as far as application forms go, lining it up so that the word processed text lines up with the boxes for each field, would take way longer, and a ton of practice runs, to get right on a computer. Somebody could spend a few hours doing it then save the document so that other users could use the layout, I suppose. Until they pressed "undo" too many times and it went wrong. Filling in forms is actually a case where a manual typewriter probably IS best. You can adjust the roller up and down in little gradients til it's just right, and you can see the form underneath, exactly where the letters are going to go. They were trying to HELP you by requiring a typewriter! Allowing a computer would have led to so many people bungling up the spacing and ragequitting, that only the REALLY dedicated applicants would be able to do it. Probably somewhere like MIT does that, and you write the Postscript by hand, after they give you the formulas they used to define the boxes (also probably in hand-written Postscript). Actually I dunno, MIT seems to have a lot more of people sticking googly eyes on an Arduino these days. Without even having to synthesize the plastic!

[@echoptic775]

I love the sentence "The only thing better than perfect is standardized". So simple yet so true

[@WesleyFiles]

But I don't think Mr. Connection agrees with the statement. I believe he was mocking this practice.

[@samwellick1706]

@@WesleyFiles it's how the world operates is what he's saying

[@Halinspark]

@@WesleyFiles Perfect is hard. Standardized is at least consistent and predictable. Whether he's mocking it or not, it's still a good quote.

[@hikkamorii]

To be fair, when we talk about staggered vs ortholinear keyboards, I think (regardless if it was a just an inheritance of mechanical typewriters, or what was deemed most ergonomic at that time) staggered keyboards are more ergonomic then ortholinear keyboards.

[@akeem2983]

I heard that despite the fact that keyboards without such stagger may seem like something superior at the first glance, in practice there's pretty much no significant difference between the two in terms of typing speead and ergonomics. So it isn't even similar to qwerty vs dvorak debate, because while dworak and colemak indeed have some proven advantages over qwerty (but even they are not enough to break the standartization), non-staggered, also called ortholinear keyboards present pretty much no significant advantages for typing apart from their uniqueness

[@PHOT0GUY]

I used an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter. You could use different font sizes and it could store pages in memory. This enabled creating a sheet with linework, corrections etc. and they just playing it back out. At that time some people were surprised seeing a typewriter typing out a sheet on its own with nobody pressing the keys.

[@AlphaGeekgirl]

I remember my boss placing one on my desk in a box unopened. It was to replace my manual typewriter. I recall getting frustrated when I tried to forcibly pull the carriage to the right.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

IBM Selectrics were also often adapted for use as computer output devices. It was basically a matter of replacing the printing electronics that were driven by the keys, with circuits that could be driven by impulses from the computer.

[@mewmew8932]

If I had that, I would get all my work done in secret, then leave it there untyped. The next day, I would just hit enter and have everything type itself while I walk away looking cool.

[@jonlewis5063]

"The paper is (stationery)" Beautifully done, just the perfect amount of pause-and-look-into-the-camera afterwards.

[@TheSanvichMann]

as soon as i realised what had happened i had to rush down here to see if ANYONE had noticed!

[@MichaelMoore99]

I had to stop the video at the "remarkable" pun. 😀

[@Stu_1977_SEmelb]

Hah! I totally missed that... - and I work in a wholesale stationery business! 🤦‍♂

[@Domarius64]

Ah! I missed that. This guy is good :)

[@nancylindsay4255]

The stationery is stationary.

[@MrJest2]

Back in, oh, 1974 or so, my father - a life-long "IBMer" - used his employee discount to purchase a Selectric II for my mother. Mom is a genealogist, and consequently did a great deal of typing. On an old Smith-Corona, very similar to the one displayed as an example of an "old school manual" typewriter. I recall two things about this beast of a machine: First, it took some two years of monthly payments to pay it off, even with the discount - they were the equivalent of a couple grand in today's money - and second, it weighed about 50lbs. My mother used it for a couple decades, happily typing (and correcting) away on her hobby before my folks finally purchased their first PC and printer. At that point, I was offered the typewriter. I took it, because it was friggin' cool, built like a tank, and did things my own ink-jet could never do. And I lugged that thing around from apartment to apartment for another 20 years before finally giving it away because I was tired of dealing with a piece of tech I very rarely used. As far as I know, it's probably still banging away out there somewhere in the wild - these things, as I mentioned, were built like tanks and would run pretty much forever. Fun fact: There was an edge-connector buried inside, and with the right adapter you could control it with a computer for use as an excellent "impact printer". I kind of wish I'd never gotten rid of it, these days... but not too much. 😋

[@thepatchinatior]

lol impact printer. I'd love to see how fast a computer could "type" with that thing

[@gramajomd]

Thanks for sharing this

[@jama211]

Super cool!

[@DickHolman]

@@thepatchinatior They were quicker than you might think, & very loud with it!

[@asystole_]

Great little story, thank you for sharing!

[@Matt-wc2mf]

I would love a full Technology Connections deep dive into typewriters. I was bracing for a full explanation of the arrangement of the QWERTY keyboard. ("No, it was not to make you type slower, it was to prevent the slappy things that were close together from actuating at the same time and jamming")

[@squirlmy]

but... "slappy things" close together actuating at the same time IS a matter of how fast one types! I learned to type on a mechanical typewriter, and I can assure you speed=jamming. If you type slow enough, the key's wouldn't jam. Maybe it's harder to grasp this without an old mechanical typewriter in front of you?

[@WarmongerGandhi]

@@squirlmy Yes, typing faster creates more jams, but it also matters which letters you're typing. If you type two letters whose "slappy things" are directly adjacent, you're much more likely to get a jam than if they are on opposite sides of the keyboard (or at least have a few "slappy things" between them). The QWERTY arrangement was an attempt to address the latter issue by separating common letter pairs, not, as is often claimed (especially by proponents of alternative keyboard layouts), to slow you down.

[@alexatkin]

@@WarmongerGandhi Indeed, slowing you down is just a byproduct of making common keys further apart, in order to make it less likely to type two adjacent keys close enough to hit each other. It would have been worse if they hadn't as you'd have to force yourself to slow down even more to prevent jams, so in practice it was actually to allow you to type faster, not slower.

[@dominiknovosel883]

I've actually got an old Yugoslavian UNIS TBM DeLuxe, it's built like a tank, and somehow, it only jams when you put actual effort into smashing down most of the keys.

[@ender4555]

Yes please!!!

[@BurgerSoda]

I find it quite ironic that WASD is a different color. It’s as if they expect us to game on it, when it can really only write text.

[@juliansinghbassi5320]

Where?😊

[@jakublehky4256]

@@juliansinghbassi5320 7:04

[@Coralalal]

it can write code. with analog.

[@Coralalal]

​@@juliansinghbassi5320 the first typewriter

[@qwertydavid8070]

no but seriously, why was wasd highlighted?

[@maryjordan7649]

My first typewriter was from my aunt who used it in the 1940's. I typed most of my college papers on it(so did my sister). It was a big black hulking thing with a large carrige bar. My next typewriter was a processor type from the late 1980's. I'll be 74 next September and the typewriter you first plunked down was my dearest wish in the 1960's that I didn't get. Your video brought alot of memories. Thanks!😊

[@dinoschachten]

It's never too late to get the things you've always wanted, even long after you need them. When I turned 29 I finally got my favourite LEGO train set that was on my every wish list between ages six and fifteen. :)

[@andersjjensen]

@@dinoschachten AWESOME! :D

[@popefacto5945]

I loved typing on my grandma's old Remington. Helluva machine.

[@victorialine5984]

Mary, you are 10 years' older than me but I learned to type at school on a heavy mechanical and used a manual typewriter in my early working life. Later came the electric typewriter, then word processor and finally the computer.

[@nancylindsay4255]

@@dinoschachten Yup. At something like age 40 I bought myself the BIG box of Crayola crayons -- the one with the built-in sharpener.

[@h.l-a683]

I realise writing actual subtitles and not just relying on Google's auto thing probably takes a lot of time and I just want to say, once again; Thank you So much for yet another awesome video with actual subtitles! ♡ it truly makes a huge difference!

[@Nikapocalypse]

You *can* just slap your script in there, but getting timing right and all takes a good amount of effort. Kudos to him.

[@pickoftheglitter]

I agree, for us that learned english at school, subtitles are quite useful and often make the difference.

[@whirlingstars]

@@pickoftheglitter As a native English speaker, who has no hearing problems, they are so nice too!

[@RyanLynch1]

agreed!!!

[@HerodotusVon]

[adorable ding]

[@bisem433]

I always liked the feeling of slinging that carriage across the machine to the next line. It was like a reward for the accomplishment of typing another line on the paper without a mistake! BTW I have lived 62 years in this world of technology and have seen a lot of changes but your videos always teach me something fascinating and new. You help fulfill my quest to be a cesspool or trivial information!

[@audvidgeek]

The same goes with slamming the handset down on an old Western Electric phone when a telemarketer calls. Hitting the "END" button on a smartphone just isn't gratifying enough!

[@RockinEnabled]

@@audvidgeek a similar thing was with cell phones - flip phones and sliders had their own ways to end a call expressively 😎

[@ian_b]

@@audvidgeek Let's face it, modern tech just isn't physical enough is it?

[@brianarbenz7206]

You and I are Brians from the same mold. (I'm 63, and feel just as you do on this.) 👋

[@victorialine5984]

@@brianarbenz7206: I'm 64 and my entire working life was spent at the keyboard. Back when I started work in 1975, typewriters were heavy mechanicals. The IBM "golf ball" was a game changer, but the real head spinner was the word processor. I can still remember my ex-employor's gradual introduction of Wang word processors, which at first was limited to one machine per department. Eventually every secretary had a machine on her desk, but it would be years before everybody had a computer.

[@PDNH]

Being able to read the used ribbon was the crucial plot point on an episode of the TV show "Columbo." It allowed the detective to prove who was the murderer and the machine was rigged to allow the audience to read the text easier than usual.

[@tpelgrim]

I love this kind of deep dives into “every day” things. I look forward to your 2 hour long video essay on typewriters!

[@mrkitty777]

Pretty sure he can make technology connection video about cat food dispenser 😃

[@davidroddini1512]

I would love to see the full essay. I was surprised to learn the 1 and ! key wasn’t part of the original design!

[@LaZZeYT]

@@davidroddini1512 I guess, I'm just not old enough, but I've never seen that before on any of the typewriters, I've used. Maybe I just didn't notice. I never used them that much.

[@CoreyDeWalt]

Me too!

[@mandi8345]

I still am appreciative about the sprinkler video. I always wondered how they did the turning action. I knew it had something to do with the weighted arm but never figured out the actual mechanics of it. But waiting for the more clickbaity channels to do a video on......sprinklers?!? Yeah...thats not going to happen. And yet TC delivered!

[@topintn]

I'm old enough to remember using both a manual, Selectric, and Daisy Wheel printer. Did you know that there were some printers that used a daisy wheel. To make those daisy wheels last longer, the letters were actually metal. I have seen a daisy wheel printer throw a metal letter into the ceiling. This was a great walk back to memory lane.

[@ZGryphon]

I'll see your daisy wheel failure and raise you an exploding chain printer. Boy howdy, there was a _reason_ those things were enclosed in those armored housings. :)

[@lam6786]

I'm fairly sure he has a video on a daisy wheel printer somewhere.

[@lindadoune]

I remember back in the days where the impact printers (non-dot matrix, non-laser, non-heat transfer) printers were called Daisy Wheel printers. I changed many a Daisy Wheel in my time. They had the advantage of producing truly sharp text in the days when laser printers were not yet common. Some even, with electronics, allowed proportional fonts to be produced.

[@pfpublius]

I'm old enough to remember when both meant there were only 2 things. Just being pedantic in the spirit of the channel😉

[@MrTBoneSF]

@@ZGryphon How about a daisy wheel printer that sunk one of the major console makers? The Coleco Adam computer was meant to take the (at the time) #2 videogame console maker into dominating the home computer market for families and kids doing homework. Instead, its "game changing" integrated daisy wheel printer caused a near 100% return rate of their computers because the entire computer system's power supply was housed in the daisy wheel printer. So if the printer failed, the entire computer was useless. Coleco was on the brink of bankruptcy (forced to exit the console and computer market) and was only saved from total collapse by the revenue from the Cabbage Patch Kid craze- but even that was short-lived.

[@DustinKreidler]

I would love both the concise "get to the point" version of these videos as well as the 5 hour long "lost in the sauce" versions as well. Both levels of immersion for these topics are ideal!

[@chicagotypewriter2094]

Oh I'd adore a 5 hour video about typewriters, their history, trivia and so much more! (And for other objects too!) We often don't realise the hidden stories & heritage in common (or once common) things, like watches for example!

[@FlyingUnosaur]

I had to skip 98% of the vid (literally)

[@DanielMReck]

"Lost in the sauce" ... "immersion." I see what you did there.

[@beffiesv650]

My grandfather was an IBM sales engineer. All of us had a Selectric and damn what an amazing typewriter. He would write us letters using the script font ball. Totally miss that guy.

[@shadowopsairman1583]

90s I played with 1, it was Gray and Blue. My Grandmother used it for work before we got a PC in 98-99.

[@Purdey921]

I had a Selectric that had dead keys I could turn off and on. I was using some French at the time. I gave it away and, I, too miss it.

[@DanielMReck]

More typewriter trivialities? Yes, please! Like you, I grew up in that transitional era from typewriter to personal computer. From a very early age, I used computers to game and write software, but I used a manual ink ribbon typewriter at home and electric polymer ribbon typewriters at school to fill out printed forms and do all my college applications. It is fascinating how much the tech of writing words has evolved, while so many older aspects are enshrined in modern iterations. ASCII has characters for "carriage return" and "bell" which are still valid in modern computers which have neither a carriage to return nor a mechanical bell to ring.

[@matthewcox7985]

Right from that same transitional period myself. My mother did freelance medical transcription when I was in high school, and we ended up with a couple of electronic typewriters, AKA Word Processors, that she used in that job before we got a Personal Computer. I helped her with that business from time to time, and I also got to write papers on those word processors. That's part of why I can now crank out about 70 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard!

[@IIVQ]

I also grew up in this era (from 1983). It's fun to show even slightly younger friends a typewriter and ask them to interact with it. Typing usually works with a few hurt fingers from getting between the keys, but putting the paper in straight requires a lot of tries. I just release the roller tensioner, make sure edges are aligned, re-apply the roller tensioner and roll down to the top of the paper, set the tab stops to 10 off of each end of the paper, then whack the return lever 3 or 4 times and whatch my friends in amazement.

[@Kineth1]

Don't forget "line feed" too!

[@jennyjumpjump]

I studied Computer Science in 2001-2003 I was 6 or 7 years older than the other students. I had to explain what a carriage return was to a few because they'd never used a typewriter. Also "Line Feed"

[@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721]

Backwards compatibility means it has to go _all_ the way back.

[@maikerugo]

That bit about period + apostrophe being used to create an exclamation mark actually explains why sometimes the mark on older typed documents (often seen in films) looked like it was italicized!

[@ProtoV33MK1]

I'd say it adds to the emphasis, bring back the italicized !

[@alexandermcclure6185]

@@ProtoV33MK1You can still do that in HTML, but it doesn't work here!

[@vibaj16]

@@ProtoV33MK1 _!_

[@raerohan4241]

​@@ProtoV33MK1 _!_

[@johnh9661]

The VERY SUBTLE pun at 11:33 was amazing. “In this typewriter, the paper is stationary(/stationery)”. Very well done!! You’ve had my bell notification for a good while now and you don’t dissapoint!

[@johnh9661]

Okay also at 17:05 a corrective typewriter that can liftoff polymer film text and type something else being “remarkable” was also a 10/10 pun! Kudos to you my fellow midwesterner!

[@ShLBh]

@@johnh9661 Both cases are examples when JOKE is just one word.

[@ChemEDan]

A lot of lines got punched in this video :p

[@mickeynott1456]

the pause was amazing

[@gr8lakes843]

My family owns a funeral home and up until Wayne county switched to electronic death certificates a few years ago we used a type writer to fill them out. We used the same model you had in the video!

[@ilearnedsomethingnewtoday6193]

I worked as a legal secretary from 2008-2010. We used typewriters all the time to fill out preprinted forms, for envelopes, and to add quick notes to previously printed documents. I always loved the feel and sound of the typewriter. It was even more enjoyable than a mechanical keyboard.

[@mryeet17boy74]

do you own research and I hope you have an good day

[@ilearnedsomethingnewtoday6193]

@@mryeet17boy74 do my own research into what? My comment took up no position nor posed any question.

[@shadowopsairman1583]

I use ESDF

[@ianmcnaney6528]

@8:25 "The space bar [moves the carriage] but without actually typing anything, allowing you to leave a gap between characters because that's how words work." Even spaces between words were an invention that took centuries. Ancient cuneiform had no spaces between words, and it was a phonetic script used for many languages so unless you were already fluent in that spoken language it would be nearly impossible to tell where one word ends and the next begins. I'm telling ya, kids these days have it easy with their mechanical typewriters and their spaces between words...

[@davidhermosillo1686]

In Rome, for instance, there are plenty of existing Latin inscriptions that have the words all run together, making life difficult for the English-speaking student of today.

[@SchlossRitter]

and even some modern languages, like Japanese, don't usually do the spaces between words thing

[@peterzavon3012]

Spaces between words were not invented in Europe until sometime during the (late?) Middle Ages. So that is multiple languages written with Latin characters that did not use spaces, until they did.

[@seneca983]

@@SchlossRitter Japanese is helped by the fact that it uses logographic script (kanji) for a significant part of the text. I think Thai is probably an even more striking example because the Thai script is not logographic.

[@marceloantunes998]

Yeah, even latin has "Scriptio continua" As a romance language speaker we all can kind of understand Latin. Take the off spaces between words, as it often happens in old churches, and it all turns into gibberish, might as well be german.

[@bigclivedotcom]

Is hard to make "short" videos without getting sidetracked and making huge ones.

[@12many4you]

Hail clive

[@onestopfabshop3224]

I like your long videos just fine Clive! Just as I like Technology Connections long videos. I'm like a sponge for learning different fascinating things. I guess I'm just a curious guy with all I don't know or are shown things I haven't seen or didn't know. Hope that made sense. Lol

[@skygh]

Did you take a break from Matt today? Keep it up we need more bs monitors

[@jjlpinct]

Hey! I watch you too!

[@vfryhn2]

That sounds like an ADHD thing

[@Slipping_thru_the_Seams]

i love how non-concise you are with this stuff, that's what keeps me coming back

[@thegiantpotato3068]

Honestly even if this video was three full hours, I'd still watch it all. All of your ramblings are just so incredibly interesting and no matter for how long they go on I don't get bored by them. They just keep getting more interesting if anything, as you go deeper into the sophisticated engineering of whatever it is you're talking about at that moment.

[@MrJest2]

Agreed - even though I already knew all this stuff, and knew before clicking what he was going to talk about, I still watched just to see how he presented it. 😁

[@steventaylor8723]

@@MrJest2 Cool story, bro.

[@r3dp9]

I might not watch a full three hours in one sitting, but I could see myself watching 6 half hour episodes in one sitting.

[@FriendlyFare]

@@steventaylor8723 He's probably not bragging. I'm 54 and grew up doing office work for my mom's business on every type of machine demonstrated (and more!)... I knew the 'ink' wasn't ink on a Selectric as I'm sure anyone of a certain age and experience with it would. But I love the deep dives and erudite, charming, yet self-deprecating way he does his presentations. I, too would observe in wonder at the way the Selectric would mechanically operate with exactness & precision. I went on to become a machinist. Then when my shoulders blew out, I became a Pastry Chef/Sugar Artist. I appreciate anything that combines art and science -as much of today's technology does.

[@yesthatsam]

"The only thing better than perfect is standardized" this is worthy of a Nobel prize!

[@DanielBoger]

Subtle jab about the EV charging cord fiasco

[@Hans-gb4mv]

Damn, I needed that one last week.

[@NoNameAtAll2]

[insert joke about modern programming languages not having standards]

[@NoNameAtAll2]

@@DanielBoger fiasco? isn't it only tesla who has a different one?

[@Temperans]

@@NoNameAtAll2 you could say that they are standardly un-standardized.

[@S.F.Sorrow]

fun fact: the inventor of correction fluid, bette nesmith-graham, is the mother of michael nesmith, lead guitarist of a popular 1960s band and tv show called the monkees, and a very good solo artist in his own right. michael nesmith then continued on to help invent mtv and also pioneered country rock. it's pretty amazing if you think about it.

[@emilyadams3228]

Country rock, you say? Interesting. I always wondered who was to blame for that radioactive sewage.

[@heroinmom153]

Cool facts. I used to watch The Monkees all the time as a little kid. It used to be on syndication all the time in the 80s.

[@benjamingeiger]

That's up there with Judith Love Cohen working on the Abort Guidance System for the Apollo missions while in the hospital, and later that day giving birth to Jack Black.

[@3dartstudio007]

I didn't see it mentioned in comments so apologies if it already is. In the 70's my typewriter had black and red ribbon. It was the laptop version of a type writer that was slimmed down to fit in a brief case. Then in the 80's they sold ribbon that was black and white. Black ink and white out! With the correction ribbon right on the type ribbon I could get BLAZING speeds and top notch looking pages even though I flub at least twice a line! Really cool walk back to the selectric era of typing. Yes, they were AMAZING!

[@CyreneDuVent]

I've got a similar type of typewriter now, with the black and red ribbon - I'll have to see if I can find some of that black and white stuff!

[@carolinebois5777]

What memories! in the late 1970s I used an IBM 'golfball' with correcting key when I worked for Macmillan publishers in England. It was the Rolls-Royce of typewriters. Thanks.

[@davidc1961utube]

I am 60, and I remember my dad's secretary (1970's standard English term for Administrative Assistant) typing at 120+ wpm from his handwritten notes while talking on the phone. Nothing short of amazing. She retyped the final version of a term paper for me in 10 minutes that took me half a Saturday to do a crappy job on. You could also walk thru the office and just listen. The best of them made a noise not unlike a low caliber machine gun. The recoil from a Selectric would also shake the crap out of a lightweight desk. That is part of the reason why so many mid-century government desks were built as if to resist nuclear attack.

[@RockinEnabled]

@@javaman4584 how did you approach that office? I have always been wondering where the stuff goes when an office closes down. Did they make a special kind of garage sale? One day, I'd like to get a film projector from some old cinema that would be closing down and/or upgrading their hardware :)

[@ehfoiwehfowjedioheoih4829]

Secretary is fine.

[@RockinEnabled]

@@ehfoiwehfowjedioheoih4829 you mean, the word? I also wondered why the OP thought it needed to be explained. Isn't 'secretary' still used today?

[@aniata4884]

That's so fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

[@Unus_Annus_]

@@RockinEnabled I thought the word secretary is still used as well

[@s8w5]

During my time at the Bundeswehr, I used a fancy electronic typewriter as well. It had some neat features that utilized a buffer: * It could write bold text, by simply hitting the paper twice with a tiny offset. It could also type underlined, by typing an underscore and the actual letter separately but onto the same position. * With either of those (or especially both) activated, it was so slow, that even a two-finger-typist (like me) could type faster than the machine. This would work perfectly, until you hit the limit of the internal buffer, causing it to beep. * It could produce right-aligned or centered text. You just typed into the buffer, and upon hitting the Return key, it would type it out at a calculated position.

[@chraman169]

Really cool, but if it was that advanced, computers must have surely been around. What was the reason not to use them? Were they too clunky to use as explained in the video?

[@LRM12o8]

Was it a Olympia Monica? I dug one out from my parents basement, it also has those features, though I'm not sure if it could do bold. I think to remember it did, but can't find the key to activate it. I typed a diary on it for fun some years ago, but things quickly started to break on it and I'm out of ribbons. Can't test it now, but I do wanna repair it someday...

[@thomasmuller7637]

Given the state of the Bundeswehr, I'm assuming this was in 2019.

[@Korokun]

@@chraman169 I can’t speak for this person, but I also used a similar electronic typewriter as a kid and it was just around when computers were becoming more mainstream. Our family just didn’t want to invest in a computer (and printer) yet when we already had a perfectly fine way to type things out. It was also before the internet was widely used so really there wasn’t much point in getting one yet.

[@MarekLewandowski_EE]

@@chraman169 try filling out a preprinted form using a PC and a printer. One you need to fill out once only. I have several computers at home and still use a typewriter regularly - mostly to fill school or kindergarten related forms for my kids education. I could do it by hand, of course, but having a typewriter with phrase memory means I just point the caret to a field and hit a key to get my address typed in. Easy.

[@divyak9980]

This was absolutely fascinating, speaking as a 25 year old who's never used or seen a typewriter IRL. I wish you hadn't trimmed the video, and I would have happy listened to you talk more about typewriters. I have always found them so interesting.

[@jelmerl1458]

This was insanely interesting! To be honest, whenever you returned from a tangent I felt a little bit sad, I'd watch an hour of in-depth video on obsolete writing machines without a doubt!

[@jaymcdonald6804]

Please do more typewriter videos. My 16 year old daughter got into them several years back, and has been a fan of your channel for a few years as well. She was happy to see both come together, like chocolate and peanut butter.

[@honkhonk8009]

W father

[@keepyourshoesathedoor]

My mom, who grew up with one, thinks they’re so useless, but I want one. :/ I guess I gotta wait and hope people still sell them around 🙄

[@EmptyResponse]

Every single time I think, "oh, I know all about this topic" I am always amazed at the extra goodness you've managed to share! Fantastic job. I sincerely hope we get an extended Connextras video about these.

[@ThisCanBePronounced]

Same; I had that or a similar typewriter model so I already knew the answer but there was still much to learn - or be reminded of!

[@nixthelapin9869]

I got an old typewriter from my grandma that I absolutely adore. Because it’s old (older than the one used in this video), some keys do get stuck, but I really love it because of the old vibe of it. It also didn’t have that correcting feature built into it, so my dad later gave me white out tape that you’d put underneath the key and type over the letter. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I got it as a kid. But wow, the model shown in the video and it’s corrections is seriously incredible!

[@sergiomendez9231]

You should get some oil (or whatever the appropriate lubricant is) for that typewriter! Help preserve it for as long as possible and I'm sure future generations will continue to admire it as you do.

[@patrikniklasson4059]

@@sergiomendez9231 NO OIL EVER! USE EITHER MINERAL SPIRITS OR ZIPPO LIGHTER FLUID TO CLEAN THE TYPEBASKET, OIL JUST ATTRACTS MORE DUST AND GUNK!!!

[@funstuff2006]

The keys that get stuck likely have some gunk in the linkage somewhere (often it's gunk in the basket), which could be carefully cleaned out with white mineral spirits and pipe cleaners (from a tobacconist, not the craft store). Just make sure you're preventing the mineral spirits from spraying onto other parts of the typewriter. There are plenty of resources online about how to safely clean out slow/sticky type bars.

[@PyroDrake1134]

I had that exact Brother typewriter growing up. I remember the “backspace” function both impressed and baffled me back then! Even after we got a computer and printer, I remember still going back to that typewriter. There was just something magical about being able to physically erase words from a page, even after I understood the concept!

[@smurface549]

Being an engineer, I can only appreciate this videos. Hell, I can easily understand how a typewriter works, I've understood way more complex topics. But I never ever even wasted a minute thinking about the functionality of a typewriter - still it left me watching the full 20min, as it's just fun to watch and learn about a random technology that I used to see when I was a kid, but never wasted a second thought about.

[@dying101666]

it's never a waste to think about these things.

[@indigo-one]

As a musician of all these years, I find your comment just as fun to read! dork

[@timmackey3401]

I think a whole show about the various carryovers from older technology to modern day (ie keyboard layout) would be fascinating.

[@samwellick1706]

A starting point would be to look up "skeuoumorph" (not sure of the spelling) on Google and find similar phenomenon

[@TheRenegade...]

@@samwellick1706 One too many Us. It's not skyoo-OOH-morph, after all

[@samwellick1706]

@@TheRenegade... yeah but the idea was communicated, i also mentioned I'm not sure of the spelling. I felt weird while typing that string of "euou" as well

[@TheRenegade...]

@@samwellick1706 I only commented on the spelling because you said you weren't sure smh

[@samwellick1706]

@@TheRenegade... understandable, have a great day

[@amasterofone]

My mom had one of these when I was a kid before we got our first computer. 16:02 that triple backspace sound just snapped me back to being a kid again!

[@cdpond]

Many more years ago than I like to admit, I took typing as a grade 10 optional class. An easy half credit I thought. The immediate bonus was that the class was almost entirely female, so the company was great... and later on when I was in college, I could type my own report papers and save my money for draft beer at the local tavern. Speed forward a couple more decades, and computers (and keyboards) becoming the defacto standard for many people's everyday office work, and that easy half credit became one of the best decisions I ever made. Even if I made it for all the right reasons. Today, I can still touch type at speeds around 70 wpm. All because of a one year, half credit high school course that I took for all the wrong reasons. lol

What's wpm? We've always measured characters only. Per minute. It was so literally painful for my brain to burn down all synaptic paths during my school learning period (obligatory at business type) but so worthy! Definitely the best skill I've learned at the school.

[@hurhurhur123]

@ any times I've been asked how fast I can type it is always words per minute, I've never been asked how many characters per minute I can do.

[@PhilippMuggli]

You just unlocked a memory of mine I didn't know I had.

[@tipakA]

@@hurhurhur123 Sure, WPM is more common than CPM, but it's also somewhat biased and has to be taken in context. For example, i'm not a native english speaker, and i believe due to that i have slightly lower WPM for english than i would otherwise. English has average word length of around 5 or slightly below, according to couple of google results, while sources for my native language point to 6 or more. On top of that, WPM doesn't necessarily account for the accents. Sure, there are keyboards that have the special characters as separate keys (like for example germany has umlauts on some of their QWERTZ keyboards), but we have too many distinct special characters (and apart from a single exception, all are for unique base letter), and so we just use AltGr + key to produce accented version. Optionally you can use tilde (shift + grave) that acts as the dead key, and then letter, much like with AltGr. But there are languages that have way more accents and/or more than one per latin character. WPM does not account for added effort of some extreme examples (vietnamese comes to mind) where you do almost twice the keystrokes for given word length, while CPM would represent that just fine. There are also languages that don't use latin or cyrillic (those two are the same in the context of this comment) letters. Don't some of the asian languages work slightly differently in that matter? Not saying that one character is one word, but in japanese the characters in hiragana represent syllables, so while there is still need to write entire word, there's theoretically less key presses needed as each key represents "more" than in latin alphabet.

[@hurhurhur123]

@@tipakA Sure, I never disputed the usefuleness of CPM as a measurement, just whether it was more common than WPM.

[@ladylilithparker]

Yes, please, more about typewriters! I remember seeing a comic strip in the paper when I was a teenager (why yes, I *am* old!) about a woman applying for a secretarial job, and she was boasting a typing speed of 55wpm -- which was pretty impressive on a manual typewriter. I went through junior high in the few years between mandatory typewriter-typing classes and mandatory computer-typing classes, so I never had formal tutelage in either, but I can manage that same speed (~55wpm) on a modern keyboard. My father (who wrote his entire doctoral thesis on a manual typewriter before correcting fluid existed, and had a side job for decades translating books for a mid-sized publisher) used to type almost as fast as that, but using only his two middle fingers.

[@something2sea]

As someone who never learned the 'correct' touch typing procedure, but can type effortlessly and relatively quickly without looking at the keyboard-I've always been fascinated by stories of people who can also type quickly using an unconventional method.

[@05Forenza]

@@something2sea I taught myself how to type as a kid in the mid 90's. My parents had a DOS computer and thats where I learned it. I picked up some of the 'correct' typing standards over time, but my hands still move dramatically around the keyboard compared to most people. I also get many comments at work that I type so fast! I use all 5 fingers on both hands.

[@efilson7581]

Seconded! More typewriter videos, please!

[@davidmiller9485]

I took a touch typing course (It was labeled as "advanced" for those who had already took a typing course and were looking to increase their skills) in Jr. High (10th grade) and my personal best was 108 WPM. Granted that was my best and i only did it once. My average was 97ish (it could go as low as 95 and as high as 100) and it got me my first job as a typist for a doctors office. Moving written notes to typed notes for files. I had a lot of fun at that job. sigh, then i went off and finished my offset printing degree the same year Xerox released the all in one Xerox machine. (it did all the steps that a offset printer would do, typesetting, scanning the image then printing the pages and included a attachment that would collate and staple you work into books or staple a corner) Talk about putting a person out of work. These days printers are used for thermographic work (raised letter business cards), Scented/unscented checks (which is also going the way of the Do-Do bird) and foil work with a letter press. (not going to mention printing money since that is a slightly different beast)

[@eddymison3527]

My dad (retired teacher) only uses his index fingers. Old manual typewriters also require substantially more force (at least those available in his school) than modern keyboards, so it makes sense to use strong fingers.

[@deut3168]

As a publishing nerd, this was great. I learned to type in the mid-90s on an electric typewriter. Had to learn how to measure margins by hand and set them on the machine. Knowing all of that helped me when I began to build stylesheets for the web an automatic publishing systems. Don't forget about correction tape! You had to put a piece of white tape between the ribbon and the paper and re-type your character. It worked pretty well, but took some time and talent to place the tape correctly. The typewriter didn't always go back to the exact place of the character so there was some ghosting.

[@jorge28624]

man, that comment brings me back: I was able to see my father (in my mind) doing just that at his job way before computers became the norm, I should get him a Spanish typewriter (and also one for myself)

[@ayanjit9196]

@Jason Carter my father has a lot of slr cameras. They were so cool. And we have a typewriter too. We used to measure margins with a scale in the typewriter. I wrote my name on a typerwriter and a short story when I was a kid.

[@Trillyana]

As you mentioned, the QWERTY layout was created for typewriters. Once I learned it's inefficient, I switched to Dvorak. But then I had to use other computers too many times that didn't have Dvorak set up so I relearned QWERTY just so I can type both and I can switch back and forth effortlessly. The brain is magical.

[@Jonathan_Doe_]

The best thing about Dvorak is the baffled looks when people try to use your computer, and the fact they’ll leave it alone.

[@Trillyana]

@@Jonathan_Doe_ When I was in college I left my laptop unattended for a second and someone tried posting something as me on Facebook, but it was in Dvorak, so he had to trial and error it until it worked. I commend his commitment to the bit

[@Jaymac720]

What in the hell is this keyboard? This is so confusing. I keep pressing Z instead of backspace. Maybe I could learn it but yikes

[@JasonHaines1974]

I joined, and now regret being on, the Dvorak bandwagon. Yes, it is a marginally better layout, but not nearly as much as the biased tests, run by its proponents, claim. QWERTY remains my mother tongue, but my use of it is too rusty and I admire your ability to be fluent in both.

[@Trillyana]

@@JasonHaines1974 I use QWERTY on my work computer and Dvorak on my personal computer. As with anything, practice makes perfect!

[@RNMSC]

Many typewriters around the early 80's would allow you to type in a couple of pages into memory, and skip the copier entirely by simply telling the printer to re-type the page. You might consider this to be the poor man's word processor, but it did not tout itself as a word processor.. My mom was using an AT&T type writer that also accepted a serial interface that made the typewriter into a daisy wheel printer, giving better 'prints' for class work or manuscripts than you could get off dot-matrix printers prior to laser printers.

[@caseysmith544]

Macintosh had one like this that could also act like a computer with a pin port for a special floppy drive that could take both types, the old paper and more modern plastic ones. Also had the Painter program besides the Word Processer and Spreadsheet (Excell like prgram) is the the ability to play most of the floppy drive games on the plastic type disc but the screen was 1/4 to 1/3 the size of a Macintosh 30/SE 30 so the Screen was not very useful. The Computer Typewriter would print using the strikers so no it could not print other work that was a picture or the like. I do think if this one port took a printer as it looked like that type of pin port the Macintosh 30/SE 30 had it could then print other stuff. I only know as it was in a big book that came with my dads Macintosh SE 30 that also had for the plain 30 version and the Apple computer that was more like a modern desktop computer with monitor not a part of the computer but was about the same as the Macintosh 30 and SE 30 models depending on model of almost identical Apple computer you got.

[@nancylindsay4255]

@@caseysmith544 Back in the days when floppy disks were actually floppy.

[@caseysmith544]

@@nancylindsay4255 Yes I have used them to retrieve older saved stuff but mostly used the plastic. The Macintosh SE 30 my parents first computer until 1995/1996 had this slot still but I never really used it as the older paper floppy had major flaws of even something like being on a stereo speaker as the speaker uses magnet that the gen 2 did not have as bad. The Gen 2 floppy could at least have a Super Nintendo or NES game quality on some like an old golf simulator game on it or another that had a F1 game on it. The worst was pin system sucked as trying to match a computer and extra pin connectors for a printer or keyboard that was not compatible was a pain in the booty until the pin system became more standardized in the late 1990's right before the USB ports for connecting all the parts became the norm on better made non cheap computers in early 2000's.

[@DoctorEth]

If you want to get real retro about typing/type terminology, it's even more fascinating (or maybe I'm biased) how the physical setup of the shelving holding the individual type pieces in early printing workshops still influences terminology today. Obvious example being "upper case" and "lower case".

[@russlehman2070]

Yes. It reminds me of how we still talk about "dialing" a phone number even though I haven't seen a phone with an actual dial for decades.

[@HermanVonPetri]

@@russlehman2070 Or "hanging up" for that matter.

[@simonro9168]

@@russlehman2070 You know these moments where you realize some obvious terminology. I had that just now. Only when you pointed it out did it click for me that *dialing* comes from the freaking dial on phones. Christ almighty, sometimes I wonder how I did well in school!

[@osku9884]

@@russlehman2070 true, but I haven’t heard any young people use the word dial. (Okay I don’t live in an English speaking country so that does affect that). The use of dial is fading away

[@xmastamurfx]

There's definitely a word for that, when a phrase, particularly a tech phrase, has lost its literal meaning due do technological advances. I just can't remember what the word is lol. I want to say that I learned it from a Vsauce video.

[@ianbutler9207]

As someone who has tried restoring an old selectric, I am impressed by whoever aligned the tilt and rotate on that selectric. Mine are ever so slightly off

[@GroovingPict]

I loved watching Columbo when I was younger, and I remember that the ability to read what was typed from the used ribbon was a plot point in a Columbo episode; it was how he solved the murder in that episode (if I remember correctly, it was one of the Jack Cassidy episodes; he played the villain in three separate episodes, all classics). It is also where I first learned that, of course, these typewriters with a ball have the ability to change fonts, because the one used in that episode wrote in Small Caps, presumably to make it more easily readable on a 1970s TV screen

[@gesamtszenario]

I remember that one. The murderer was a magician, and the victim knew he used to be in the Waffen-SS, and was blackmailing him with typewriten letters.

[@djsherz]

Ah you beat me to it, it brought Columbo to my mind as well! The episode in question was "Now You See Him", from 1976.

[@martin.752]

I remembered this episode, too. At the time, I wondered why on earth the typewriter left out spaces even on the tape. Which, of course, it doesn't in reality :)

[@Doomclown]

I thought the same thing!

[@Treblaine]

I wonder who played the most different villains on Columbo?

[@Sientir]

Fun programming fact: in ASCII, there are special non-type characters for both Carriage Return and New Line! This video has finally made it sink in why that is. Some character environments require both to be present for a newline, some use them interchangeably, and others only use the newline character. This can cause wonky spacing to happen if you take a text document from one environment into a different one, typically by either gaining an extra newline in between every line, or losing all of your newlines and having everything on a single line.

[@CTSFanSam]

Carriage Return makes sense on the old Teletypes. It provide a way to return the head, then re-strike desired letters to make them darker. Or, if you couldn't stop the teletype from typing when entering a password, the location of the password on the paper could be over typed with a collection of characters to hide what what was entered. Thus, having new line (line feed as I remember it) makes sense. Move the paper one line, or not, your choice.

[@softy8088]

Despite the cries of Linux and UNIX fans, the One True Way to make a newline is with CR and LF together. This is standardized by ISO/IEC 6429 aka ECMA-48. In this case Windows gets it right.

[@matroosoft4589]

@@softy8088 Also LF stands for Line Feed. This is the correct name, not New Line.

[@canadajones9635]

It was also used to allow slow TTYs to have time to return their carriages while line feeding before continuing output.

[@photonicpizza1466]

@@softy8088 UTR 13 defines any of CR, LF, CRLF, NEL, LS and PS as a valid line end marker. Unicode is the standard pertinent today, the world doesn’t run on ASCII and ISO 6429 anymore. Windows, which outputs only CRLF without more specialised software, may have gotten it right 30 years ago, but it’s very wrong now.

[@firesurfer]

As my typing teacher said in 1967, " Remember, typing is going to be big in the future". Some people in the class didn't have electric ones, they had manual typewriters. It was harder to press the keys.

[@Thestargazer56]

I also remember having to learn binary because there were these new-fangled comptrations called"computers" coming in the future that would be useless unless we learned binary and how to do algebra in multiple base systems.😡

[@ALCRAN2010]

I always assume, in my sea of computer cubicles, that the folks that smash their keys loudly while typing, learned to type on an old typewriter.

[@peterbonucci9661]

@@ALCRAN2010 I learned to write on a manual. I just got a keyboard that looks like an old typewriter and I'm punching the keys as hard as I had to back then!

[@chicagotypewriter2094]

For someone who's typed on a computer for most of their life (in terms of typing), it's a lot harder in the sense (that it takes a lot more strength) to type on a manual! We're so used to light taps when you had to hammer those things back then!

[@firesurfer]

@@chicagotypewriter2094 When you hear two dozen people pounding on the keys, you will never forget the racket.

[@Frisco1355]

I have a 1960s Smith-Corona Corsair portable typewriter. It’s pretty handy. I get a whole lot more use out of it than I thought I would.

[@PatchNote_Jones]

My grandfather owned a typewriter repair company in San Francisco, their basement is still full of mostly-broken typewriters. I only occasionally got the chance to use them while he was alive, but they're still really cool pieces of non-electric tech. Glad to see they're getting some appreciation! And I just learned the other day that for older typewriters, if the carriage gets old you need to replace it. The rubber hardens and the force from the type bars can snap the typefaces off. In case anyone was running to a thrift store after this video.

[@MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive]

1. Did your grandfather's company repair typewriters for the SFPD? Not only do they still use typewriters but require their paperwork to be filled out on carbon paper by typewriters. There was a report from the Chronicle or Examiner from some years ago detailing annual police bills totaling tens of thousands of dollars on typewriter repairs. The ongoing joke is that it's a racket by the carbon paper and typewriter repair companies, which you could have gotten in on. 2. There are tutorials on how to replace the platten (rubber part of the carriage) with a regular rubber hose and a blow dryer to shrink it. 3. Are you selling or giving any of those typewriters away?

[@greenaum]

Imagine popping by your local Staples and asking where the replacement typewriter carriages are.

[@PatchNote_Jones]

@@MildMisanthropeMaybeMassive 1. Don't know! I know they did work for the hospitals and some other institutions, so it's possible. 3. I unfortunately don't have the authority to be selling them, but I think most of them are going to be offered to places (museums etc.) as donations once they eventually get through it all.

[@mjouwbuis]

I think some platens can be made usable again using chemical rejuvenator. You can also throw them in the laundry unless they really glazed up.

[@CyreneDuVent]

Another trick for a hardened platen is just to put a couple sheets of blank paper behind your page even if you're only making a single copy - the extra sheets cushion it, and they're all set up to allow this for carbon copies anyway

[@DeadStuffGuy]

Please please tell us so much more on typewriters, I’ve always loved the look and feel of them and now knowing there are correcting ones I really want one. If you could possibly review modern typewriters on the market today that would be an absolute blessing

[@stevethepocket]

I spent all of five seconds thinking "That's a thing???" before remembering that Kids These Days think cassette tapes are cool again so I really shouldn't be surprised.

[@absalomdraconis]

Well, I don't think there are actually "modern" typewriters at all (Smith-Corona themselves seem to have become a printer company), but if you're fine with 90's era (or 2000's era maybe, since I think that's when Smith-Corona switched over) then you can just patrol the local thrift shops for a while. I have both a Smith-Corona Coronet (an "electric" typewriter, because it's a motor-assist model) and some budget model electronic one (electronic because, unlike the electric one, it actually has logic onboard... via a microprocessor, but it's short enough on feature that the processor is just a detail).

[@sn1000k]

@@absalomdraconis No, there's currently produced ones, as noted in the video. I think Royal makes one.

[@DeadStuffGuy]

royal seems to have two models in current production and there are one or two other brands that make seemingly identical ones to what appears to be the more popular model from royal so a review of them still wouldn’t be very interesting since there’s not really any diversity, perhaps better would be a video comparing typewriters that can commonly be found today on sites like eBay to the ones in current production and looking deeper at the features that made various popular typewriters different from each other (manual vs electric, ball vs daisy wheel vs baskets, forms of type correction, spell checking, etc.)

[@MechMK1]

My mother actually owned a typewriter, and as a kid, it was one of my favourite toys. I didn't have the user manual, so I basically discovered what each and every button did, purely by trial-and-error. And I too was fascinated by the error correction feature. One tap of the button would hit the tape several times, in a very strange rhythm. It was the best feature of the whole typewriter.

[@orangejjay]

Heck yeah. I had one from my grandmother that I learned to type on and LOVED that it could delete things. I loved everything about it. How heavy it was, how loud it ways, that bell ... it was cool for six-year-old me back in the 90s.

[@kellyradtke4885]

I learned to type on a typewriter in the late 80's early 90's I remember when we got the "correcting" typewriters to the consternation of our typing teacher who employed the T-shirt over the keyboard method of touch typing instruction. He quit when they wanted to install computers in his classroom in the early 90's. I can still touch type at a decent wpm, I'd make a decent 60's secretary. My grandma even had an old school typewriter I could type too fast to use without slowing down 🙂

[@johndododoe1411]

Yeah, I took similar classes after school in anticipation of computer use (I still touch type on those) but had used typewriters at home before that, just without the touch typing technique .

[@oreubens]

9:00 dead keys still exist on computer keyboards for languages that have to type a lot of accents. combining diacritics is even one of the features of Unicode and people are abusing it to make "zalgo" text.

[@snooks5607]

although to the keyboard dead keys are just like any other key it's the OS that decides how to use them

[@ElchiKing]

Sô, I ám writing vèry strange text, using a Qwertz-keyboard and some dead keys.

[@thomashowe855]

@@ElchiKing nice

[@ZealotPewPewPew]

Incorrect. Some people are abusing Zalgo text to make terrible nonsense like French.

[@oreubens]

@@ZealotPewPewPew French is definetely nonsense. 😅

[@ManWithBeard1990]

When I was going to college not that long ago it was commonplace for first year students to introduce themselves to the older ones, and they'd give them certain tasks to do as a sort of coming of age ritual, you know. One of them had the great idea to make his student take notes for him on one of these old-fashioned typewriters, to see how long it'd take until the professor asked her to go away. The professor knew right away what was going on and thought it was pretty funny himself (presumably this wasn't the first time someone had done this), so of course we were treated to the full two hours of typebar noises and carriage bells.

[@dickJohnsonpeter]

Why would they embarrass themselves just because some older student in the school told them to? I'd have told him to screw off and take his own notes.

[@dickJohnsonpeter]

@@Brap-pl2me What? For asking an honest question? I wanted to know why people did that because I honestly don't know why they just wouldn't. How is it that being tough? It's kind of sad you wouldn't because you think that's some kind thing only "tough guys" can do. I must be then since no one makes me do anything stupid.

[@ManWithBeard1990]

​@@dickJohnsonpeter Studying at uni comes with a lot of stress. For a first year student it's a whole new environment with new people and a massive increase in studying workload compared to high school. Getting to know people is an important step in feeling comfortable in an environment like this and traditions like these are one of the ways to break the ice, so to speak. It isn't mandatory, you only do it if you're up for it. Of course if you want to give such challenges to younger students yourself you are kind of expected to have done one yourself, it's only fair. But only if you're the kind of person that enjoys that which you, clearly, do not. No one holds that against you but do remember not to take things too seriously when you don't have to.

[@dickJohnsonpeter]

@@ManWithBeard1990 Well it is funny but not for the person who is doing it so I just kinda wondered why it was a thing people felt obligated to older students to make them embarrass themselves in various ways such as that. I was in a fraternity at one point so in that scenario hazing made sense to weed people out and you endured it voluntarily for a reason but I didn't see it anywhere else where you didn't have any obligation like some jerk in my class saying "hey take notes for me and do it on a typewriter" or whatever other funny thing they could come up with. It's like yea, ok dude like I'm going to do that.

[@ManWithBeard1990]

@@dickJohnsonpeter Yeah it was a fraternity thing. English isn't my first language so I didn't know the right word but that's what it is.

[@jqual1]

I remember that my grandma had a typewriter when I was younger. It was one of the electric ones too so it the easier to use correcting feature. I was always increadibly fascinated to see the words lifted off the page and always wanted to type on it whenever she would let me. It was increadibly satisfying and was cooler than typing on a computer. I am now 20, and once I get out of college, I think that a typewriter will definitely be something I buy. I think some of my nieces and nephews would have a blast on it.

[@rizzlerazzleuno4733]

Get one of the Brother or Smith Corona daisy wheel typewriters with memory and spell check. They are awesome. Many different models and usually very cheap. Lots of KZbin info about them.

[@Kevins-Philippine-Retirement]

I am an old long toothed retired technician. I have serviced the old type-arm versions, type-ball versions, as well as the daisy-wheel versions. Your video brought back many many memories, some not so fond,lol! In any case, that was mostly in the 70s. In the 80s I started working on the dedicated Word Processor machines such as Micom and Wang. As time progressed I worked on terminal systems, particularly in the large Canadian banking networks. Then into the 90s, my work was mainly on PCs. In the 2000s it evolved into high end networked PCs, tablets and smartphones. In my 40+ year career as an electronic technologist I witnessed the evolution of IT that today boggles my mind much more than the simple user. Moores Law is alive and well 😉

[@gordonglenn2089]

Wang! That's a name I haven't heard in a very long time... I learned to type on an Underwood manual (Use the Force!) and progressed through all the electric typewriter stages to today's PC word processor apps and inkjet printers.

[@Kineth1]

Well, the enter key used to be referred to as "carriage return". Also, in plain text documents, the invisible characters that get inserted when you press the enter key (depending on the format) consist of or, carriage return, line feed. Many manual typewriters grabbed the first bit of lever-action on the carriage return to feed up one line, thus combining and mechanically into one action; much like the enter key does for us today.

[@ElLocoBedoya]

I managed to pull a Newtonian physics exam in highschool on a clunky black Remington, and a static physics one in college 3 years later in the very same machine for the same reasons: The teachers were annoyed with my hand writing so I decided to annoy them more with my loud typing. Over 30 years later they still tell the tales there.

[@buckfox8822]

Please do another typewriter video! Well done. I’m old enough to remember working for a major newspaper and finding old typeset equipment in storage along with a couple of LINE cameras that were the size of a small car … the film negative was 2x4 feet and used to make each plate for the press. The advertisement dept. would cut out pictures of a product (cars, food, etc.) and using red cellophane tape (which would not show in the pic) attach them to a cardboard stock before taking a photo to make the ad plate. Lot’s of memories!

[@TwoBs]

I love the sound of a bunch of typewriters in a room, people tapping away, and carriages being pushed back to the right. Reminds me of typing class in high school. Even though it was 2006, our teacher (who was like 65 at the time and always smelled of a freshly smoked cigarette ) found it very important for us to use a typewriter instead of a PC. We used models that had been in the school since the late 70s. I didn’t mind as I had used them before, but that was probably my strictest class with our posture being constantly corrected by the teacher, her constantly hovering over us to make sure we had our hands resting correctly on the keys, and often was graded by how many words per minute we’d put onto paper. Thank goodness our class was on the third floor all the way to the back end of the school, because it would get loud in there lol. I enjoyed it. Can’t say I’ve really used a typewriter all that much since, but I still find myself making sure my hands are positioned correctly and I sit upright when I am typing something out on my PC that is longer than a few sentences lol.

[@Liggliluff]

It's nice that you did mention typewriters with accent marks that don't move the carriage, since that is a feature not found on English-language typewriters normally. Often people ignore non-English stuff on KZbin; partly understandable when most content is in English, but I still want to learn neat trivia about for example French without first having to learn French and watch French videos, or by watching specifically French-based content.

[@PatricioGarcia1973]

I helped friends in college with their Spanish class homework that would get lower grades because they forgot to use the accent mark on the words.

[@Liggliluff]

@@PatricioGarcia1973 That makes sense. In Spanish, accent marks only marks stress and you could technically ignore them and some do, it's not a good practice but it's not _completely_ wrong. Writing "adiós" as "adios" is a bad practice, but not like massively wrong. However, letter Ñ, and some letters in other languages like Swedish Å Ä Ö, or Azerbaijani Ç Ə Ğ İ Ö Ş Ü, those are considered completely separate letters. Just like how you see C G, or I J, or U V W, as completely separate letters. Using the wrong letter here, such as writing "sjögräs" as "sjogras", that's like writing the word "grow" as "crouu", or "judge" as "iudce".

[@HughMiller98]

@@Liggliluff Same in French. On a European French AZERTY keyboard, accents é è à ç are given priority over number keys and could therefore be considered their own keys, since so many words use them (You have to press the SHIFT key (or the MAJ. key) for the top row numbers). Canadian French keyboards work differently as they can be bilingual. In regards to grammar, accent determines the tense of a word (i.e. will be done, has done, is being done etc.). 'To play' is 'jouer', 'I play' is 'Je joue', but 'played' is 'joué'. The French language is very strict about accents because they change the meaning of the word as well as the pronunciation.

[@Gamerdude753]

@@Liggliluff english has a few words with accents. Ex. Naïve and résumé. Although the version without accents are used so often that they're also considered correct and avoids some encoding errors which replace the accented letter with a ? or a box. If you see these weird symbols that obviously don't belong it's because the computer just sees characters as 1's and 0's and replaces them as text on the screen. If the computer doesn't recognize the group of 1's and 0's then it'll use a place holder symbol

[@Kraus-]

@@Gamerdude753 Those are both French words, not English lmao. You can tell they're not English because they have accented letters.

[@tokoloshgolem]

As a kid I used to have to re-ink the ribbons for my parents’ typewriters. This episode really took me back and made me realise that a lot of people nowadays have never seen or used a typewriter. The persistent spacing of keys is particularly amusing considering this.

[@wobblysauce]

Reinking was quite the thing, as some got ink everywhere.

[@fireant202]

Of course the whole QWERTY layout was designed to specifically slow down typists so they wouldn’t jam the swing arms iirc.

[@billogle4776]

@@wobblysauce Ink everywhere, that's because inks aint inks and the machines used to apply the ink to the fabric cost from 15,000 to hundreds of thousand dollars. my factory had three inking machines that all ran continually,.

[@IHateUniqueUsernames]

@@fireant202 That reason always didn't sit right with me, being that if you list RSTLNE (a string of "most common English letters" repeated by Wheel of Fortune game, for any reference), the letters R, S, T, and E, sits in as close a cluster as you can pretty much manage simultaneously allowing each key to be independently triggered by different fingers of the left hand resting comfortably on the keyboard -- increasing the proximity of the mechanical arms and thus risk of collision. Almost every typist would be of the one fingered "hunt and peck" first before earning the muscle memory that allows for "touch typing". It is not quite feasible that the inventors could have foreseen or predicted the speed at which these masters could have been capable of in contention to the mechanical limits of their designs. Remember that the typewriter is conceived as a tool to be faster than writing, and intentionally designing a keyboard layout that breaks that design principle seems counterintuitive as well. With a grain of salt, it seems a Japanese team tracked the evolution of the QWERTY and quotes that early adopters for the typewriters as being telegraph and Morse code translators, and would have a great influence on the eventual design. Perhaps if we understand the nomenclature and shorthand they use, it may come to better theorize why the QWERTY is so.

[@yvrelna]

@@IHateUniqueUsernames the QWERTY is designed so that when typing English document, the keyboard layout maximizes the probability that you would alternate between left and right hand between each pair of letter of the most common English words. In other words, it minimises the chances of long streaks of key hits with just one hand. The way it was designed is to generate a list of the most common digraphs (two letter pairs) that occur in common English words, and designing a layout so that the most common letter pairs are on opposite sides of the keyboard. Also, the most common letter in English is ETAOINSHRDLU, in that order.

[@pickoftheglitter]

when my son was a little younger than now, he loved to play with my old, manual typewriters. New generations are often amazed about mechanical stuff, since today almost everything is made by solid state electronic. They can't even imagine a world when things needed to move to do the job. Today things are easier, but they've lost some of the magic.

[@ambarcraft4476]

When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents I often played with my grandpas old mechanical calculator because it was so fascinating to me.

[@WyvernYT]

@@ambarcraft4476 I remember the mechanical calculators ("adding machines") at my grandparents' office. Such lovely machines!

[@fdmillion]

I feel that way about my reel-to-reel tape recorders. MP3s and FLACs are awesome, but watching the big reels spin while music plays is sorta mesmerizing, operating the controls on those big machines is so satisfying, and there's something I still love about physical media. Now, excuse me while I design a fidget-spinner-shaped 7" tape reel for 3D printing...lol

[@lapsijahti]

Ok, gatekeeping boomer.

[@camelopardalis84]

My grandmother, born in 1918, lived in the same house as me when I was a child. Before I knew how to write, I liked writing in her mechanical typewriter and put stamps (the ink kind) on the paper. I did so when those things were sitting around in her dining table anyway after she's taken care of some paper work. Edit: on/on; not in/in

[@mrmusiclover4178]

I learned from hard experience with PC's to use labels for addressing envelopes! I am from the typewriter generation; my typing classes were in the late 1950's. I still have a portable Royal manual typewriter from about 1945. On my job, I had an IBM Selectric III which was a wonderful typewriter. Unfortunately, it was notorious for problems! All those little niceties were prone to trouble.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I wrote a Python script to manage it years ago. You give it the text and font, it measures the block and properly centres it both horizontally and vertically on the page.

[@WthrLdy]

My Smith Corona Skyriter from 1952 sits patiently on my office desk. She is loved and used often. I even customized her. She's a portable dream, and the crowds I draw when I take her on location to work :D Talk about powerful fingers. Typing on a computer keyboard and a typewriter are totally different, a computer just needs a tap and roll, a mechanical keyboard....well, there's a reason my dad used to call it a bang and mash. LOL

[@MikeKobb]

Because I am ancient, I actually had a typing class in school. On an actual typewriter. And it was an IBM Selectric. Absolutely fabulous machine, and a pleasure to type on. We didn't have the correcting models, but I later had my very own Brother knockoff with a correcting ribbon.

[@kevmorris3000]

Me too. That typing class was probably one of the most useful classes I ever took in school. It has served me well for decades after.

[@3Cr15w311]

My high school (Cedartown High School, Cedartown, GA) had IBM Selectric typewriters for their typing classes and I had the class in 11th grade (1984-1985 school year).

[@elvinhaak]

@brendanm720 Here: still on real mechanical ones... computers were electronic and had printers in the next roommmmmm

[@Ang3lUki]

Because I'm an early zoomer, I had a typing class where the teacher took a break and let the kids play typing games in the computer lab

[@russlehman2070]

I learned to type on manual typewriters. After computers came along, it took me years to break the habit of snapping my wrist with each keystroke to give the key a good smack, which is necessary for a manual typewriter, but does nothing but wear out the keyboard, and possibly give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome on a computer keyboard. I did my college term papers and assignments on a manual Smith Corona portable very similar to the one in the video (but blue rather than orangey-brown. It would have been so much easier with a computer, word-processing software and a printer, but I was born a few years too early for that to be an option.

[@ecyor0]

the Selectric has now jumped up near the top of my list of "vintage electronics I have precisely zero practical use for but man it would be cool to own one and play with it."

[@fredblonder7850]

You have no idea. The Selectric keyboard is the nicest keyboard I have ever encountered. Typing on one is almost erotic. The entirely mechanical mechanism that drives the type-ball is a thing of beauty. It’s also designed so every part can be serviced without needing to lift or turn it.

[@Sgt_Glory]

My grandfather owned a typewriter repair company that lasted well into the computer era. Selectrics kept coming right up until the last days, even after electronic typewriters had become far more popular. Fun fact: The motor in a Selectric is HUGE. It's a 1HP, shockingly quiet electric motor. That's right your Selectric has the power of a horse behind it. Which is why getting your hand caught in the carriage return could break bones, and why that element moves with such unstoppable ferocity.

[@stevethebarbarian9876]

Everything I hear about that Selectric just makes it sound fucking cooler. I also have absolutely no use for a typewriter (let alone a 50 pound, $1,500 one) but god damn is it one sick piece of kit. That ball literally moves between frames of this video, how fucking cool is that?

[@ChaosPootato]

You manage to consistently find subjects that make me go 'huh. could be interesting...' and once I'm done I'm as fascinated as you probably are. You're one of my favorite channels

[@pauljones2510]

Born in the 50s. Was very interesting discussion of stuff I grew up with. First learned on a manual without the 1! key.

[@cuttingbored4195]

I love my typewriter, a 1936 Remington "Noiseless" Portable. I bought it around 2011, and it only had one previous owner! It had been in constant use for almost sixty years, and I did have to replace the carriage system - but other than that it works like new. The sales blurb for the Noiseless says it's perfect for libraries - but it's still pretty loud to my ears!

[@magnusbuinevits9535]

17:10 that was brilliant. No way I would've gotten that if you hadn't left that little pause there. You truly never disappoint.

[@kalisal.6894]

Came to the comments to see who else caught this. He's a monster for wordplay!

[@ghostsyynx]

Holy shit I missed that one. He's a genius.

[@xbolt90]

This man is the king of amazing understated puns.

[@Fr0styChips]

Not to mention 11:32 “the paper is stationary”

[@DavidPagan]

I had to pause a take a break after that one. The masterful puns just come right out of left field.

[@travatron4000]

The timing of the pun at 11:32 .... just pure gold. Perfect execution. 10/10 no notes.

[@NAG3V]

Hearing this and seeing old typewriters with their margin settings, makes me feel like younger generation seeing floppies and recognizing them only as “3D printed” save icons

[@Kevins-Philippine-Retirement]

The first systems I services as a technician used the 8" floppies. Yes they were called floppy for a reason; they were... well; floppy, lol! Then came the 5¼"; much less floppy. Then the 3½" diskette "stiffie" developed by Apple, then the CDRW and the DVD-RW. Of course nowadays disks/discs are pretty well obsolete, including the mechanical hard drive as all storage is quickly becoming solid state.

[@JollyRanchersGrandma]

I still had my hands on floppy discs as a child in the early 2000s but what's astounding to me is my nephew born in 2015 had to have VHSs explained to him not too long ago. Dont even get me started on Cassette tapes lmao

[@otherlego]

What do you mean 3D printed?? lol. This generation isn’t that stupid. We know what a floppy disk is. (Seriously though, 3D printed? Genuinely no clue on that)

[@UNSCPILOT]

Found a Sony Mavica FD75 floppy disk camera a while back, the resolution is tiny but it's surprisingly fun, and the ejection/loading mechanism to change floppies when I've used up my 15~ shots is very satisfying, hilariously it has 10× optical zoom too which is still more than most phones. Still need to make a "floppy disk" holster to go with it so I don't need to carry my floppies around in that flimsy cardboard box...

[@AlphaGeekgirl]

​@@otherlego It's common knowledge... at least to us oldies. I recall seeing a TV show where they asked teenagers what a 3.5" floppy was and the kid said that it looked to a real version of the Save icon on his computer. Not so crazy when you think that he recognised the Save symbol, but would not have had a clue that it actually represented something in the real world.

[@dmorga1]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. My mother, a freelance technical writer-editor for a third of her life, was constantly typing. She spent a great deal of time marking up documents, and when computers become more common, she would farm out the "typing" to a word processing expert who would type, format, and print the final draft of the document. But for smaller jobs, when the little Smith-Corona wouldn't do it, she would rent a Selectric II from a place called Progressive Methods in Atlanta (now closed) and would put the document together at 120 WPM. She later bought one of the rental Selectrics when the deal was right, and I remember playing with the discarded ribbons, with that little thumbwheel and such thin plastic-like tape. It seemed just like an audio cassette tape to me. Finally, she eventually bought a nice Wheelwriter with all the font wheels and fancy stuff, and kept that (and used it!) until her death in 2019. As you point out, to kids, it might seem silly, but if you have a typewriter around and know how to use it, it was THE way to quickly address an envelope, type out a Rolodex card (also a foreign concept to youth), or type out a recipe card. She also would sometimes type out driving directions or quick note on a 4x6 card. For her, typing was always faster than writing. I miss the sound of that typewriter.

[@sn1000k]

Nice.

[@Dashitishere22]

Isn't typing faster than writing for most people? I feel like handwriting is super slow

[@RonParker]

Tab stops are a fun topic, especially on that Smith-Corona. My mother had one of those that I used to type my papers in high school, and if you had a tab stop set far enough to the right of where you were, tabbing to it would build up enough momentum in the carriage to toss the whole machine to the left.

[@scottmanley]

Omg that first 30 seconds describes my video creation process exactly.

[@brianarbenz7206]

Is that really you, Scott? Hello. I love your videos!

[@Chimaera32]

Hullo, Scott! Whatever detours or frustrations your process generates for you (as any worthwhile creative endeavor does), it’s resulted in years of informative, entertaining, and downright awesome videos for us to enjoy, so thank you for sticking with it! Actually, it was your KSP videos that got me watching KZbin in the first place, so I should also thank you for being my Technology Connections connection.

[@Quasihamster]

Honestly, yes. I am surprised you have a collection of typewriters. At least a bit.

[@DJKinney]

I wish you would go ahead and permanently get stuck in the creation process.

[@slidingontheice]

!

[@funlightfactory6031]

The 'qwerty' keyboard was designed for use on typewriters so that frequently used letters were spread apart, avoiding clashing or jamming of the most used 'hammers'.

[@stepheneyles2198]

My late father worked from home all the years I knew him. Our cats would sometimes visit his desk, and being helpful as cats are, would walk across the typewriter keyboard, pressing keys as they go! This usually happened as dad neared the end of the report he was due to submit to the customer against a short deadline! The cats were then chased out of and banned from his office, at least until he got lonely and let them in again!! ;-))) Thanks for this trip down memory lane!

[@taxman3749]

I used to treat my mom's old typewriter like it was a toy when I was a kid. I was endlessly fascinated by the mechanical controls and aspects of it. It was one intricate machine that I loved to explore.

[@frsl771]

Absolutely do more typewriter stuff! And like, I enjoy when you go off on a side tangent about topics! Learning information I won't retain but still like experiencing in-the-moment even though I likely won't use it is entertaining and in general a big reason I subbed to your videos. Let's see a 40 minute topic about this!

[@amunak_]

Yeah like dude... we are here because we WANT to hear your tangents and explanations, we WANT all the details, and the more you give us the better. I would be absolutely happy with this video being twice as long!

[@boboclair]

Love the videos! Personally I'd rather have several 20 minute videos on type writers than one two hour long one. I'm glad the run time was short so I would have the easier time finding time to start it.

[@dan_goodman]

I spend most of my time every work day on a linux terminal. It's amazing how much of a terminal's function and even language around it (line feed, carriage return, etc) is based on how a typewriter worked.

[@BenjaminKibbey]

This brought back so many great memories of my Mom on her electric typewriter in the 80s. She was very protective of her correction tape (evidently it wasn't cheap) and would make us use white-out for anything more than a single letter mistake when typing up school papers. Also, her typewriter had a feature where you would see the letter immediately in that little screen, and then there was a small delay before it typed it to the page. I remember this, because she was insanely fast, and would well-outrun what the typewriter could do, so I remember her typing for a few minutes, then turning away from her typewriter to look at a book or something, and the typewriter would keep going for what always seemed like forever as it caught up to her.

[@samwellick1706]

Damn your mom's fast! She could be a hacker/coder today

[@jctoad]

Some of them would display the characters so you could proofread it before telling it to type it.

[@BenjaminKibbey]

@@jctoad Yep. This one was just a delay though. I don't remember how significant it was, but when I was typing it was never more than 4 or 5 letters behind what I was typing. Given it was 1980s tech, I can't imagine it had a huge buffer.

[@jctoad]

@@BenjaminKibbey I use to service those for an office supply store back around 85. The daisy wheels were pretty slow compared to an IBM Selectric, but they looked nice.

[@robmulally]

I have the same memories! I remember mum getting an electric type writer to do to typing jobs. The sounds in this video brought back so many memories, i to remember thinking the correction was magical.

[@eugenenalpin6058]

I really, _really_ want to see a Connextras, or hell, even another full video on typewriters! These machines are plainly fascinating!

[@SolarShado]

I was a bit disappointed that that line didn't lead to a mention of a Connextras video...

[@Melancozy9]

I love how well made these are made, yet you can still find little goofy things like fart jokes in something as innocuous as a used ink ribbon.

[@jude1293]

somehow i missed that until reading your comment!

[@wjlafrance]

This video got me to buy a typewriter. I got a Brother GX6750 for $90 on eBay. I was disappointed to find the correction tape didn’t work, but it was just “aged out”. New tape is available on Amazon and Brother’s own KZbin channel has replacement instructions. I sent my first typewritten postcard this evening on 67 pound paper.

[@asterm4977]

I’m younger than you, but I certainly remember typewriters, mostly because I was allowed to play with an old one laying around in my grandparents’ house. Super cool to learn more about them!

[@electricAGENT]

I had this same experience, my grandpa used it to type letters to his buddies!

[@micahphilson]

My grandpa still has a couple, I think he even gave one to my little brother who loves them.

[@meinnase]

Same and really they make for great toys😅 Being able to easily see and figure out how the thing works all on your own is a great feature and they just sound so satisfying, i also got to play with my moms less ancient electrical typewriter but it just wasnt the same lol. No wonder people are spending 100s of bucks now on custom mechanical keyboards. If you type alot, satisfying feedback makes the experience so much better.

[@SWebster10]

That beat after “the paper is stationary” was just brilliant!

[@endymallorn]

The Selectric line of typewriters are some of the most interesting machines ever to exist. But there is a definite joy in a portable, because it’s still one of the easiest ways to dash off a physical document when you’re on the move.

[@metamorphicorder]

Not better than that one toaster tho.

[@mackenlyparmelee5440]

With manual typewriters, it's the most cathartic way too

[@bytemegga]

this video took me back when i played with my late mom's typewriter when I was around 5 or 6. thankyou for this

[@rcmaniac25]

I remember my family getting one fancy electronic/digital ones for my grandfather. We had gotten him a computer but he didn't really understand it, so we took a step back and did the typewriter instead. I loved playing with it. Then one day it just... disappeared. Not sure about what happened but glad to hear an explanation about it.

[@billgreen1861]

Correction, as an experienced twenty five year secretary back in the 60's, I can tell you that there was a Correction paper for use in carbon copies applications. It was a pain in the butt, because you had to insert it in the same area in all copies and then try to pinch them without one slipping out of place or you had to do it over. Word processor came in when I was going out. 🙃 Yes, I know I'm old. I also remember my "boss" lifting the paper to the light and if he saw a shadow of a letter or word that was corrected he'd ask me to do over. Those were the days...

[@KaizerKilborn]

Your boss was an asshole. But that correction paper sounds really interesting. Thank you for sharing!

[@billgreen1861]

@@KaizerKilborn He was ! 😁 And you're welcome !

[@victorialine5984]

'Those were the days...' when typing was a skill. I remember learning how to tabulate (involved counting characters) and doing columns. Today's keyboard users know nothing. 😂

[@billgreen1861]

@@victorialine5984 Victoria, you made me laugh 😃 because not to long ago I was teaching a neighbor how to count spaces to center a title and that brought back memories. I find myself still trying to type the old way and then I just give up because I know nobody out there knows or cares how I'm typing. But it's fun sharing those memories. Thanks for sharing.

[@brianarbenz7206]

You were taken aback. I was just _taken back._ What remembrances in this video! Every term paper deadline. Every passionate letter to the editor I fired off. This was fun - but not nostalgic as such, because I don't regard those days as _better._ Just good and worth recalling. The transition to word processors seems so rapid in retrospect, though the changes were steady during those years, and each was a challenge to make. The sound of the old manuals, then the electrics, saturated offices and media outlets. Then it became the Apples, with those sensual sounding flexing keys designed to keep the noise down. As a journalist starting at the tail end of typewriter era, I can say writing in a newsroom became more cerebral, because of the ability rearrange text easily, but also because of softer sound from around us.

[@v0id_d3m0n]

i love your description

[@brianarbenz7206]

@@v0id_d3m0n Thank you! Glad you liked it.

[@davidg4288]

Early IBM PC keyboards were delightfully clicky, I miss them. Dot matrix printers not so much, geez those were obnoxious.

[@brianarbenz7206]

@@davidg4288 I used a rare Apple II, which my sister had bought for her business in the early '80s, during the two-week or so window when the II was in vogue. She gave it to me a few years later and I loved it. Such a comforting feeling from using those keys.

[@davidg4288]

@@brianarbenz7206 The Apple II was a popular *home* computer for a lot more than 2 weeks! I was still using a mainframe terminal at work during that time period and sadly never owned an Apple II. We did have a TRS-80 Model II at work for spreadsheets and to communicate with the IBM mainframe. Ironically the TRS-80 could connect to the IBM mainframe but the IBM-PC could not. Of course IBM solved that problem in a year or so for a price.

[@jomercer21113]

My parents bought me an electirc typewriter for high school graduation in 1975. It was a Sears Communicator I that came in either pica or elite typeface, and used slide-in cartridges with either cloth or film ribbon in a choice of 5 colors (my favorite was green), plus a correction film tape that functioned by stamping white over the mistake. It was a portable that weighed about 30 pounds. It was sold for about $250--an considerable expense for my family at the time. It was hella noisy compared to the IBM Selectrics they had in the typing classroom at school. I originally learned to type on a 1930s Underwood manual typewriter that had belonged to my grandfather.