The Weird Typewriter-Computer Hybrid: Smith Corona PWP-3200

[@ZeidKhan]

Every time I hear that "ding" from a typewriter, I'm reminded of being a little kid in the late 80's and early 90's, when computers hadn't been spread far and wide yet. I'd have to type up papers and would go to my local library where they had a long table with several typewriters on it. People would just sit there and type up their papers all day long. I had to have a librarian teach me to use one; she was surprised I never had. After I got my first computer, I remember going into the library one day and being surprised that all the typewriters were gone. They were replaced by computers. Except now, instead of young kids (who couldn't afford computers, trying to type up school reports), it was all old people trying to learn how to use a computer. The same librarian who taught kids how to use typewriters for the first time, was now teaching the elderly to send emails.

[@asnowballinhell]

I'd forgotten about library typewriters. How could I forget? IIRC, you had to pay to use the typewriters, 25 cents for set amount of minutes.

[@chen5chs]

@@asnowballinhell this is why typing fast is good

[@miguelcarmona3036]

Okay this was like super cute wtf. Idk It put a smile on my face

[@drunkgaming3064]

Nice story! It reminded me I was thought in school but it was so weird because we also already had computers. My class was like an introduction though, there were women majoring in being a secretary typists and had more lessons.

[@glennso47]

When I hear the “ding “ from the typewriter, I,m reminded of the song by The Boston Pops Orchestra called “The Typewriter.”

[@KevinBerstene]

File names are "Cool" and "Cool2". Yup, definitely stuff from high school.

[@GalbreathSQuin]

I have a word processor a recently bought, and some of it's files are named "oh yeah, fuck, sex, i love tom, babyyyyy, bitch", etc. Definately a used to belong to a highschooler!

[@julianmorrisco]

Vigorous pumping! Indeed. I did a typing course more than 20 years ago and we had these miracles of modern technology. Of course, there were some IBM selectrix (or whatever they were called) but they were for exams and finishing students. These Smith Coronas were cheap and cheerful and the mainstay of the school. Although WordPerfect and MS word (DOS) were around, these things hit a sweet spot of space, cost, noise (no computer fans) and edit ability. I still appreciate the workflow - work as if you are on a typewriter, but you can edit and fix typos! Nowadays I just vomit whatever is in my head and edit later, just like everyone else. This works fine, but there is some value in the discipline of having to collect my thoughts before starting to write. I managed to get above 95 wpm using one of these, and although I highly doubt I’m anywhere near that today, I never regret having had formal typing lessons.

[@VarunGupta3009]

You mean High sCOOL?

[@NoorquackerInd]

Yeah sure, I'm in high school and my Google Drive is all "bruh" "bruh2" "agh" "aaaaaaaa" "cringe" "turbo cringe" "frick"

[@njdotson]

@@NoorquackerInd unnamed document But when on my own pc I name stuff "thing" "cringe" "I won't finish this" "wacky image" "why am I like this"

[@TechnologyConnections]

This video is just pretty chill. I've had this thing in my collection for years and wanted to show it to you. There's not much of a point here, but I hope you find it interesting. There _will_ be a point, though, for next week!

[@quinius173]

Great video!

[@mystica-subs]

I had a simpler Smith Corona word processor since the early 90s or late 80s.. 2 line LCD display maybe 60 chars wide maybe less... I wrote a lot of school assignments in my life on it and it was tedious as hell to write multiple pages into 2 lines. But it worked! It's so cool seeing this more featureful version. Thanks!

[@Dallen9]

What would have been cool/funny is if you showed of the MS Word version of one of these typewriters.

[@kelli217]

I am not sure what you mean by "showed off the MS Word version". Can you elaborate?

[@JasonHalversonjaydog]

i owned one of those, except mine was a Brother brand. had it back around the mid-late 90's i think it was. the "word eraser" wasnt' exclusive to smith corona, my Brother had that too, just a slightly different name. had a word eraser and a line eraser where you could delete the whole line with one button

[@stewie3126]

I had something similar to this when I was getting my masters degree, and its practically impossible to understand how wonderful it was to have a way to create a document and then have it typed out. Prior to that I spent more time manually typing, correcting, use white-out and correction tape, then I did doing the paper. And still my papers were a mess. So the speed of this was not an issue at all because it was a huge time and labor savings!

[@stephengnb]

It must have been a very satisfying sound when you were done writing a paper, then hit print and listened to it rapidly type out your paper that you know doesn't need edits.

[@C_Floor]

Stewart Grifin

[@ohsoloco5113]

I had one similar that got me through college in the 90's. I couldn't afford a computer, and I despised going to a computer lab on campus.

[@designator7402]

When he wrote "If I start typei word qords words!!" that really hit me

[@twongi6044]

spoken like a true genius

[@addammadd]

Why isn’t this a t shirt?

[@zappawoman5183]

I had one of these! I worked as a secretary for a Private Investigator, typing up reports and bills on this typewriter. I got good at lining up the text because it would tell me how many characters were left. Minimised mistakes as well! ETA: The sounds, oh my the nostalgia!

[@PanAndScanBuddy]

I'm sorry but it's funny to hear "I was a secretary for a private investigator" and have you waxing nostalgic about the typewriter. Like, I know we're all here for cool typewriter facts so I am not passing any judgement when I say this, but it's funny lol

[@timothymclean]

500 years from now, some archaeologist is going to cry in delight at finding a copy of Microsoft Works, only to weep in anguish as he realizes some kid with NO idea of its future historical value wrote over it with his school papers, like an artist who scraped the surface off of Shakespeare's first play for some spare sketching material. But hey, at least he has a plot summary for _Twelve Angry Men._

[@TorreFernand]

There's a lot of debate in the TV and radio industry over tapes that were recorded over because "We don't need this episode anymore, might as well give some use to the tape. It's not like anyone will watch it in a few decades, right?"

[@brickman409]

Fernando Torre Yeah I think there's some episodes of Dr who that are lost forever

[@xaenon]

@@TorreFernand Yup. Virtually all of material from the old Dumont TV network was dumped New York's East River.

[@xaenon]

@@smpmuzpid I'm honestly surprised it works today.

[@DarthVader1977]

@@xaenon virtually all of the* material

[@lucasrossiemc]

"That's why it's called the 'Shift' key, because it shifts the carriage down." My mind is blown. One of those things you never question the origin of, but when someone tells you, your face becomes a meme.

[@spicyweasel]

I think the arrow on the shift key shows that the characters above on the key are activated.

[@squatchhammer7215]

Typewriters either shifted the platten (the roller where the type strikes against) or the Corona basket shift.

[@therealvbw]

BBBBUT THE CARRIAGE MOVES UP! I own a typewriter.. This explains the up arrow coincidentally

[@dhpbear2]

@@therealvbw Back in the days of typesetting, 'Uppercase' referred the the typefaces in the upper half of the printer's type case!

[@muppetpaster]

Same as upper/lower case.........

[@dandelion_fritters]

Omg, I would LOVE to have something so simplified. Just typing and printing. No ads, no unnecessary software, and other then the ribbons and corrective tap, no mess! It does exactly what you want. It’s why I had a typewriter, but if I had one that took key drives instead of floppy disks, I’d be set!

[@troglodyte-kc2sl]

Yeah it's kind of a shame. I always thought these were cool, but I was born in 95 so by the time I was in 5th grade and started having a lot of essays, nobody had one of these anymore and if they did, they had a full PC and a laser printer anyway. Probably today a Chromebook or equivalent extremely cheap PC and a gimmicky compact single-tone printer is cheaper than an integrated word processor would be. It would be cool, though, even it's not as useful as vague equivalents like reproduction Polaroid Instas.

[@nuclearpsychopath]

Interesting note about the printing speed of the typewriter, which you called a bit slow: If you look at around 9:20 , the typewriter has to reset to each line to type left-to-right. IBM Wheelwriters of around the same period (which also supported floppy disk external storage) printed documents from memory in boustrophedon - that is, the first line was left-to-right, then the second line was right-to-left, then the third was left-to-right and so on. This saved time as the typewriter did not have to reset the carriage all the way to the left each line. Over a long letter I'm sure this would add up to quite some time savings even if the per-character typing speed was the same as this Smith Corona.

[@ecamville2928]

That's really clever!

[@Tangobaldy]

This wasn't slow it was an amazing thing to own. By today's standards it's awful but back then it was epic

[@BertGrink]

I agree; i bet anyone who owned one of these would be the envy of their peers, back then.

[@RacerX-]

It was epic if you didn't have a computer. I remember messing with these in the store and used to wonder how the heck people used these they are so slow. I had a C64 and an Amiga at the time and later a Macintosh so compared to these it was hard to use a WP like this. If you did have a computer it was 1000 times better speed, even the C64.

[@rimmersbryggeri]

Its no slower than an Apple Laser Writer. They were fucking shit toock up way more room and were less reliable than this like all early laser printers were. The other drawback was that a computer with a printer cost more than a car and the screen of a contemporary macintosh was no bigger and black and white. At least any macintosh anybody would have at home. Ibm compatibles were still very expensive to . Just a hard drive would cost more than this whole machine.

[@RacerX-]

+tarstarkusz. Yeah I know what you mean. 40 columns was sometimes a pain. But with the right software it wasn't so bad. I did have (and still do) the RAM expander, and with GEOS it was great. As for the Amiga it was a no brainer. There was plenty of software in my neck of the woods in California. In my small area, hardly a metropolis, there was no less then 6 places that sold Amiga and software. I never bought software from mail order, and never had a problem finding anything I needed. In fact in the early 1990s the A500 was easy to get in a bundle for about $200 with a tv adapter, word processor, games, and RAM expansion. Of course by 1992 it was a bit out dated but still a much better experience then the likes of this WPS. I am not sure why people say that software was hard to find in the USA because it certainly was not my experience. Plenty of software and hardware to choose from. If you look at the manufacturers of add ons and software for the Amiga most of them where from the USA. All you have to do is browse an old issue of Amiga World or Compute! of the time to see what I mean.

[@TalesOfWar]

I had one of these. THey were a joy to use before computers were more common and reasonably priced. Oh, and when printers stopped sucking (quality wise, they still suck in terms of usability and software lol).

[@matthehat]

I have a real soft spot for machines like this - not quite a full computer, but not quite a "dumb" device either. Great video, keep up the good work.

[@matthewghali2987]

Matthew Harrison (matthehat) if it had a serial port to hook a modem, it would have been perfect to hit the BBSes back then!

[@Chriva]

Funnily enough, many of them actually had some horsepower. It was just a matter of dumbing the software down and remove any means of video output.

[@El-Burro-Grande]

The wife and I got through our undergrads at Memphis State in the 90's with this machine. It was awful. But I recall you could play a very bad version of Tetris on it.

[@benny_lemon5123]

No matter how clunky, horrid, disappointing the information processing tech human kind ever creates, we always at some point find a way to milk even just a drop of novelty from it. Lol.

[@Patrick94GSR]

hey fellow Memphian over here! I just drove through midtown and East Memphis this morning, actually.

[@rutgerb]

Sounds like a LGR thing

[@ttun100]

I had one, it was cheaper than a computer and printer and I wrote many college papers and resumes on it.

[@arfansthename]

does it use wasd or arrow keys?

[@maxis2k]

Aside from it being very slow in some areas, I love these kinds of devices. Something that puts mechanical processes into an electronic device fascinates me.

[@thegardenofeatin5965]

I have this concept in my head I keep trying to find an outlet for. Modern computers, which are millions of times faster than this old Smith-Corona, are used for largely the same tasks as this. People use computers for very manual tasks with just the barest hint of automation, like spell check and whatnot. Word processing hasn't really improved much in the last 20 years, despite Word bloating like a pregnant sow.

[@blakksheep736]

​@@thegardenofeatin5965 I beg to differ. Different fonts, font sizes, font colours, highlighter colors, page colours, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, headers, footers, landscape, page sizes, tables, spreadsheets and forever on. Heck, if you told someone at the time of this device a day will come where you can put _videos_ in a text document, they wouldn't believe it, but here we are.

[@MikeRoberts1964]

I had one of these in the early 90s. Ironically, years later I was in a stationary store to buy a replacement ribbon for it and while waiting in line, saw a copy of Tomb Raider 2 in the remainder bin, bought it, installed it on my computer that I'd bought in the meantime and fell in love with video games and started writing by doing Tomb Raider fan fiction on the SC 3200, then started writing original fiction....20 years and a dozen novels later, I can say that it all started on/ because of this machine.

[@dexterramey8787]

What novels you writep?

[@BlueMastic]

The shelves in the background are so much more beautiful than the greenscreen. I really like it!

[@Elesario]

IKEA at its finest :D

[@meeder78]

Agreed!

[@zivizivi2328]

meh too busy and distracting. just like under my desk

[@BenMarvin]

Holy crap! My family had one of those. It was the only computer in the house till my brother and I fished an IBM AT and IBM XT out of the dumpster of a nearby business park. They were covered in food waste, but still worked. Although smelled like baked beans when turned on.

[@willythemailboy2]

My family had several. I spent a lot of hours on these things.

[@richfiles]

No one will ever need more than 640 Kilobeans of odor emanating from their PC.

[@nelsonbrum8496]

🤣

[@magusperde365]

The AT and XT keyboards are probably worth more now than anything else

[@53pittmanjt]

This makes me feel really old. I remember the huge step forward of graduating from a manual typewriter to an electric, and then to typing Nirvana: an IBM Selectric with (gasp) built-in correction capabilities. Exotica like this PWP-3200 weren't even imaginable. Horribly slow, clumsy, noisy? Yup, but that depends on where you were sitting at the time. Great video. Wish I'd had one then but glad I don't have one now.

[@PhthaloType]

What makes me feel old was he graduated high school in 2012.

[@PanAndScanBuddy]

Imagine typing KZbin comments on a typewriter! That would be dope. Really feel the weight of the words.

[@russlehman2070]

Having gone through college typing term papers on a manual typewriter, I can appreciate what a step up even this was. Though it is tediously slow and clunky compared to a modern (or even 1990) PC with word processing software and a decent printer, just the fact that you have some editing capability gives it a huge advantage over any regular typewriter, even an IBM Selectric. With a typewriter, editing usually consists of throwing a way one or more pages and starting over. OTOH, that daisy wheel print head looks like it would break if you sneezed at it.

[@dwightl5863]

@@russlehman2070 To be honest those daisy wheels very durable.

[@ruaboutasize14]

My mother, God rest her, grew up in the 60s working for department stores and investment companies doing office work, typing, secretarial duties, etc. When I was a kid and had a book report or some essay for school, she would have me write it out on loose leaf and then after I went to bed, she'd be down in the dining room typing it up for me. She was able to type upwards of 120 words per minute, and almost never make a mistake. Just hearing that clicking of the keys and the ding at the end of the line really brought back some good old 1980s memories.

[@astrothsknot]

I was always jealous of how fast my mum could type. I find the typewriter noises soothing, because they remind me of my mum.

[@morgantrias3103]

I’m glad your typewriter is a basket shift not carriage shift (despite what you said about it moving the carriage), clearly a man of taste. When I disposed of my typewriter collection my first point of elimination was getting rid of the carriage shift typewriters, so now I just own two basket shift ones. It’s weird to me that carriage shift seems to be much more common than basket shift, despite it being so inconvenient.

[@AirborneSurfer]

You used this in high school because you were a retro nerd. I used this in high school because it's what we had! 😜 Also: keep the jacket. I dig it!

[@tanya5322]

AirborneSurfer I had a similar electronic typewriter in college, but it did not have any removable memory option. And those small floppies that looked like a slice of American cheese were still somewhat new

[@leogrievous]

Can you please upload a second video where you let the typeriter print an 10 Page document? I could watch the printprocess forever.

[@MrOliverock]

He should do a 10 hours of video.

[@DarthVader1977]

let the typewriter* print a* 10 page document

[@DarthVader1977]

@@MrOliverock He should *do* *10* *hours* *of* *video.*

[@asailijhijr]

@@DarthVader1977 too many asterisks *bolds* the text.

[@dj33036]

I agree, there's something really fascinating about the way they work and the sound they make.

[@DrewberTravels]

My grandmother had one of these computer typewriters. Probably not this specific brand, though. One day in grade school I had to write a paper for school and type it. I was at my grandmothers and asked her to use one of these machines to do it. I typed the whole thing out chicken peck style. Once I was done, like an hour later... we couldn't figure out how to get the stupid thing to print. Frustrated my grandmother just walked over to her traditional typewriter she had in the office and typed the thing out in 5 minutes. She said she knew I did it so she didn't mind.

[@CableFlame]

My grandmother had a much earlier model from the same company: a PWP-80. I'll never forget that thing, nor the sound it made when it booted up.

[@AmberAmber]

Awww Sweet gramas both XO

[@planetfoxdotnet]

My mom bought the Brother version of this thing back in 1991, which is how I first learned typing. Ours must have been kind of a fancy one because it came with a nice 10" amberscale CRT display and it was way, way, way faster than that Smith Corona. I don't recall ever having to wait for the screen to be redrawn just for deleting a few words. It was kind of on-par with a mid-80s 8-bit business computer like the Kaypro or Osborne in that regard. It even came with some additional software, including a spreadsheet program. The daisy wheel printer was loud and kind of slow, but it wasn't significantly slower than other printers of the time and produced perfect text. If you compared it to a dot matrix printout there was no contest, and no one could afford a laser printer back then. It was actually a pretty useful machine and very durable. I used it up until the early/mid-2000's for college papers because I couldn't afford a decent printer. I'm still using the monitor from it as a novelty display for a Unix computer after I figured out how to build a circuit to convert a regular luminance (Y) signal to monochrome TTL video and sync. Now I'm going to have to make a video about that.

[@zaptowee6625]

I found a Magnavox Virtual Typewriter in an abandon house during my high school years. It was a very beaten up graffitied home, walls smashed, & stuff on the walls everywhere, windows broken & boarded. However there was one small room upstairs less touched than most, still with boxes of paper, junk, & holiday decorations. Yet something in the very back corner caught my eye, yes it was the virtual typewriter. Instantly I knew this was something great, & carried that thing back to school, it was very heavy & there were multiple non-attached parts. It didnt fit in my locker so for my last 2 periods I carried it around with me, & brought it home on the bus. Low & behold after probably 15 years of sitting in an abandon rotting house without windows the thing still worked. I plugged a floppy drive into it & it can save & read data as well perfectly fine. I'm pretty sure thing thing is either from 1979 or 1989, it had a 9 at the end but I googled the info about it years ago now so I could be completely wrong. It has a yellow & black screen, & is pretty cool.

[@MickeyD2012]

I like the jacket. It gives you an air of professionalism without conceit.

[@fun_ghoul]

I'd say it's more of an air of "You'll need a jacket to enter the dining room, sir."

[@ChadWSmith]

In 1992, I was a freshman in High School, and we took "Keyboarding" class on a Word processor / Typewriter hybrid. It wasn't the machine in your video. What we had was a much simpler machine. It actually had a normal daisy wheel (not a daisy wheel printer) and it did not have a disc drive. I believe the screen was only 2 or 3 lines tall, and you could only type one line at a time. Once you hit enter, it would print the whole line. The next year, we got a room full of computers and idk what happened to those word processors.

[@MattMcIrvin]

In the mid-1980s in my freshman year of college, I briefly used an IBM Wheelwriter that was even simpler: it didn't have an LCD, but it had enough RAM in it to store the last line or so of text, and it had a lift-off correction ribbon in addition to the regular ribbon. Those things together meant that even though you were typing directly to the paper, you could delete the last few words you were typing just by pressing a delete key--it would remember what characters to type to make the lift-off ribbon do its thing, much like this gadget here in "type mode". Like this Smith-Corona, it used a daisy wheel rather than a type ball. But it wasn't long before I got hold of a computer that could handle a usable word processor (an Atari ST) and never looked back. I'd already gotten used to using WordStar and WordPerfect on my dad's computer at home, so I wasn't going to stand for using typewriters for very long.

[@olik136]

Sad is, that I took a class 10 years later to learn how to type- and they would give us actual typewriters... in 2002..analog, mechanic typewriters... the class did cost money

[@MrGoatflakes]

Lol you couldn't pay me to do take that class +Oli K. Unless I was writing a novel or something. Actually no, even then, I'd rather just write it in Notepad++, Notepad has blown up on me too many times when I hit the (16k or is it 64k? can't memba). Is that still even a thing? Lol. Actually I'd even rather do a novel in Vi or something horrid like that rather than having the torture of typing on a typewriter or even worse writing it out long hand :x And yes I have even used Vi on a ancient piece of shit SunOS 4 or some crap. In a terminal. Over dial up. Hell, I've even done "word processing" on a "TRS-80 Color Computer II" "64kb" (yes I am quite sure they used to say KB or kb not kB and mean 1024 BYTES not bits) "home computer" with a "word processor" "cartridge". Without so much as disc, tape or even printer. So the document would vanish as soon as anyone else wanted to use the computer. What I would do was type in any notes I'd made earlier when I didn't have access to the computer or compose on the computer. Then edit it till I was happy with it or more likely someone else needed the computer. Then as we didn't have a printer or anyway to save work, I'd literally copy it out with a pen and paper. Only to have to type it all in again if it needed further "word processing". It was still faster than using my portable mechanical underwood typewriter, which I sucked at, although if I would have thought to use scissors and glue to "cut and paste" actual paper then perhaps the underwood would have won out, because it was the cutting and pasting not so much the typing that saved me real time and made it easier to write and organise my thoughts. Because as primitive as it was, 32x16 characters on a screen at a time and MUCH less than 64kb useful memory total for the text itself, not that I ever managed to get that big, that's like a good sized book chapter maybe, and was in grade school, you could do useful work by reorganising disjointed ideas and putting them into a coherent structure by actually "cut and paste"ing and I found it WAY easier to going about my writing that fluid way, Although I'd probably just had manually cuntpasted actually longhand and then copy it out neatly when I was done, that's how much I hated using the damn thing. It jammed a lot cause the arms were bent from me and my brothers abusing it from pressing multiple keys at once, before we knew this was bad. And I in any case found it near impossible to get the requisite speed with it to actually form thoughts and put them down onto paper with the mechanical portable underwood typewriter. Although I liked the idea of it, and occasionally I would even type manually the "final word processed draft" manually out by hand if I wanted it to look extra spiffy. Fuck what a hideous workflow. Although it was a revolution over writing into an exercise book of actual paper with a pen or pencil, as fucked as that sounds, it's true. Now we have workflows verging on the magical, and equally magical distractions to make sure you get even less done between arguing and pontificating on social media and watching cat videos and leveling your paladin and learning how to program and writing toy programs to make sure "know how to program" without actual ever writing anything particularly useful...

[@johnfrancisdoe1563]

Oli K Those fully mechanical typewriters teach touch-typing much better than computers with all their distractions. Except one major issue: They teach you to hit the keys harder, which increases the risk of RSI where using actual computers. Been there, got the bandages.

[@tinnagigja3723]

I lived in Iceland, so we had (probably) those same machines under some "teachy-sounding" Icelandic title, so I haven't been able to find them. A failure of my google-fu. Who made those things? What are they called? Keyboard trainers?

[@Nauctshea]

My grandmother had one of these in the early 90's. I remember playing with it a little bit. When my grandparents were living in England for a few years we received many letters typed on that machine. It seemed very professional at the time and the print quality for text was much better than a dot matrix printer.

[@DavidFell]

I’ve been a journalist since the 70s. When you print from disk on that machine, it sounds very much like the newswire machines I saw back then, which had been in use at least since the 50s.

[@peabody1976]

I have one. I got it in 1992, and I used it for everything in high school. It was a savior when doing papers and I could save and print at school if I wanted to use a better printer.

[@JerryEricsson]

When my good wife of 48 years and I wed, she was the proud owner of an old Remington portable typewriter. We used the hell out of it for personal letters and what ever needed to be typed, even my kids used it just a little when they were in grade school. When the end of those word processors was in sight, I purchased a cheaper model that had only one line of text but did have spell checker built in so it made me a much better writer. By the time Workers Comp sent me to college for "re-education" the day of the computer was at hand. I found a third hand laptop computer, a 386 SX with monochrome, that served me through college and got me hooked on laptops. Anyhow thanks a billion for the video, it brought back some great memories of days long gone now.

[@matthewghali2987]

Jerry Ericsson thanks for the stories, and reminding viewers that not everyone's family could afford a new computer, no matter how much "better" they were. There's so many negative comments in this thread, so its nice hearing a few more grounded stories. Take care!

[@saintpine]

Around 1983 I left the old noisy and nerve wrecking Olivetti Typewriter with the rotating ball head and worked on what looked like an IBM compatible, it was an Olivetti wordprocessor with monocrome CRT and wordprocessor dedicated keyboard. One thing I miss was the incredibly intelligent and soft feel of the screen scroll. Unfortunately a few years later I did my military service and had to work on a honeywell bull card perforating machine, the printer was an estreemly fast and noisy parallel head 132 column printer. Practical a drum across the sheet had all the letters and numbers for each of the 132 positions. The drum would roll at a high speed and 132 hammers would hit on the right (or write) time. The same noise 132 manual typewriters would make working together in a small room

[@tanya5322]

saintpine I can remember taking an intro to computers summer school course ... probably in the very late 1970s, or maybe early 1980s. The class had an Olivetti ... I’m not sure if it was an actual PC or a terminal. I don’t remember much about the printer it was paired with, but I do remember that the keyboard had a much nicer ‘feel’ to it, in my opinion of course. It’s a tactical response that still look for in keyboards today.

[@Cadwaladr]

When I was in college there was someone in one of my classes who had one of these, and this was in 1998, so it was pretty outdated by that point. Also they were trying to print something during class and the professor was not very pleased.

[@100percentSNAFU]

I was still using mine in 2000 when I was a senior in college. My housemates mocked it ruthlessly, lol. So I would punish them by printing up my reports bright and early in the morning! And as you know, it sounded like a jackhammer.

[@cat.professor.]

I would always end up printing my papers at 3 am and my roommates hated it for me. I sometimes would put a pillow over it to try to muffle up the sounds. Ha ha. @@100percentSNAFU

[@marcusdamberger]

@@100percentSNAFU Serves them right! You should have printed up at 3am like @Cathleen Daniel did!

[@wayneyoung8647]

When reviewing items like these, please keep in mind their era and technology level of that era. I had a similar machine and it seemed like magic. I was able to create an entire training program for a restaurant chain on that machine and output the manuscript by myself. No mean feat for the time.

[@RRaquello]

People may laugh at this, but I remember the first time I saw an electronic calculator. It was a Bowmar Brain, and they had them set up in the TV section of Korvettes, a now defunct department store. You were allowed to try out the display models, and we kids thought they were an absolute miracle. We'd stand there for a half hour just punching in and adding and subtracting and dividing numbers, wishing we had one to do our homework with. They cost about a hundred dollars (a hundred 1973 dollars, that is), so were way beyond even wishing for. The dawn of the computer age!

[@wayneyoung8647]

@@RRaquello I remember the Texas Instruments calculator my father bought in 1976 for his contracting business. It was rechargeable and had a case to carry it in. I was allowed to check my homework with it. Great stuff!

[@RRaquello]

@@wayneyoung8647 My brother got a Texas Instruments calculator for his birthday one year, and we all considered it an outrageously expensive present (this was around 1977 or 78), but our parents justified it because he was an accounting student and needed it for school. What we actually did most with it was stuff like figuring out batting averages. The TI calculator also did mathematical and scientific formulas, so it was more advanced than the Bowmar Brain. We spent hours with that calculator and the Baseball Encyclopedia just making up our own categories of statistics and percentages and figuring them on the calculator. I guess an early version of Moneyball.

[@blakksheep736]

​@@RRaquello and now calculators cost nothing. Sometimes less than nothing. And not in all that long, too. It's great.

[@MibaCallabus]

We got a word processor like this for Christmas in 94...I was enthralled. We never had a type writer in the house and I'd never used a computer at that point. I wrote prolifically as a kid but all by hand - having a machine to save, edit and print my work was a dream! I think I still have a folder of stories I wrote and printed somewhere...

[@lixielabs]

The jacket is back because "because". You show them haters, TC. :D

[@megabojan1993]

Fuck the haters. That's what I always say :)

[@call_me_stan5887]

i.imgur.com/mPBa8K3.png

[@youreperfectstudio7931]

The jacket is sexy!

[@zombiegeek33]

i think he is cute with or without the jacket

[@youreperfectstudio7931]

Well Naomi Campbell is still sexy naked but is even more sexy with Victoria's Secret underwear on. I think its kind of the same thing but with a jacket in this case.

[@dunebasher1971]

My wife had one of these in the early 90s. It only had a 3-line display and no media drive, but it was fantastic for things like job application forms where you had to fill in your personal statement in a large box. All you had to do was photocopy the form a few times to give you some practice sheets, and you could use trial and error to work up a typed statement that fitted *exactly* into the box.

[@joeltunnah]

dunebasher1971, funny that we fill all forms now by hand pretty much. But yes I remember filling forms out with a typewriter in the 80’s. I suppose now you could scan it in, convert to PDF, and then edit it directly.

[@RMoribayashi]

Back in the day this type of machine was popular in college classrooms that allowed them, even ones that didn't run on batteries (but God help you if someone tripped on you power cord). Both the word processing functions and the printer seemed more than fast enough back then because most people who used them had nothing faster to compare them to. When I first used the DOS version of Word Perfect on an IBM PC in the late 1980's I was astonished just how fast it was compared to what I had been accustomed to.

[@AmberAmber]

Same!!

[@rogerjewell4390]

My boss was thinking of buying one of these for work, but I persuaded him that a DOS PC & Lotus 123 would be more flexible. And it was & it got me started in the world of computers!

[@LittleDancerByGrace]

My mom had one of the spiritual ancestors to this thing in high school (late '80s). I later claimed it and wrote my first novel on it in 2008. It has a (much smaller) screen and no floppy drive (apparently it had some RAM and you could compose and edit a document using the small screen and then print it, but I never messed around with that), but it definitely had the word/line eraser function and a very similar 'typo' beep sound . It sounded EXACTLY like this when when you switched it on (via a very similar sliding power switch). In 2008, I could still find ink cartridges (and correction tape) easily at the local Staples. This was a good thing, because an ink cartridge apparently only does about 10,000 words.

[@robbiemer8178]

That was fun to watch! I worked at Smith Corona way back when and I worked on the "re-work line". We fixed the PWP boards that didn't pass inspection. I don't remember anything specific about the chips or software, my job was to put the board on a test fixture which would then display something like part # what ever. I would then just replace that. I didn't need any electronic/computer knowledge just had to know how to solder. There is a single huge circuit board in these and I remember that the first batch of boards was ordered before the engineers had completely finalized the layout so we spent a lot of time just adding jumper wires and cutting some of the runs on the board. At the time, the choices for office work were basically an electric typewriter or a computer and dot matrix printer. These were something like 1/3 the cost of a typical office computer and printer. I think these machines were also tested to/rated at one million keystrokes.

[@joeltunnah]

rob biemer, no comparison on print quality between these beautiful daisy wheel machines and horrid dot matrix printing. Even my 2018 canon inkjet print quality looks bad next to them.

[@someguy2135]

Years ago, I worked at a store that sold these things. I sold a personal word processor to George Carlin. I can't remember the brand or model, but it had a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. This was the early days of computers and some people preferred a dedicated machine because of various reasons, including a lack of interest in learning to use a computer. Another reason was to simplify things. Everything was designed to work together, instead of trying to get the software to work with the computer, or the printer to work with the computer, etc.

[@JrIcify]

Even though I love custom PCs and open software, part of me would love for this mentality to come back.

[@morpheus_9]

George carlin was the goat!! Rest in peace!

[@stockicide]

It felt so weird when I first discovered that a "word processor" used to be a physical machine instead of just a piece of software. Most people probably assume we jumped straight from typewriters to terminals.

[@fun_ghoul]

Terminals is a funny word to use there. Made me think of the Bell Canada "Alex" thing my uncle used to have back in the day, ostensibly for stock ticker info but...there were also chat rooms and he was a single twentysomething in Montreal. Anyway, the device was weird. Thanks for the flashback.

[@Solitaire001]

Before getting our first PC at work we had a CPT Word Processor. It used 7" floppy disks that could hold 100 documents, and had a printwheel printer that was so loud that it was put in a sound-dampening enclosure. Due to low amount of memory it had you could do copy and paste or justified printing, but you had to reload the OS to change from one to the other.

[@clarkjbunch]

I had a Brother word processor in the mid 1990's. It had a full size "computer" monitor with the printer/keyboard made together in one unit. The Smith Corona shown here prints one line, returns, prints the next line. My Brother would print one line left to right (forward) and then print the next line from right to left. That was fun to watch.

[@danielnavarrete5481]

This is how I did all my homework in the 90s. It brings back memories.

[@TorreFernand]

9:27 I find it hilarious that it "Angrily" types 12 angry men just because it's underlined

[@deusexaethera]

Yeah, no. It's typing the underline separately, because otherwise it would need a separate set of typefaces for underlined vs. non-underlined characters.

[@AidanXavier1]

@@deusexaethera right, which makes it come across as angry because it's slowed down and hitting the paper twice per letter

[@deusexaethera]

@Alice Eliot: I certainly hope that isn't a complaint about me being un-entertaining, because you're posting on a video about vintage office equipment. I'm fun at the kinds of parties I get invited to, because I know things and I don't always say exactly what is expected of me.

[@_ikako_]

@@deusexaethera do you also correct people when they tell a joke that isn't scientifically accurate?

[@Milamberinx]

@@_ikako_ what Shawn said wasn't even a correction (even though he started "Yeah, no") he just restated Fernando's comment in a terribly boring way. If he'd managed to impart any information that's not bleeding obvious maybe he'd get invited to more parties.

[@Jaymac720]

This is basically Microsoft word: hardware edition

[@Aragubas]

that's why is soo slow

[@HomeofLawboy]

So like, Microhard Word right

[@ChaseMC215]

True

[@liamsamples2965]

@@HomeofLawboy Macrohard*

[@Milamberinx]

It's not hardware though, it's software running on a very low power computer.

[@mikewesthead477]

Wow this takes me back! I used an early variant of this machine I bought in 1989 to do my college course. As my first ever experience of owning a 'computer' at home it was really exciting. My version of this machine didn't even use a 3.25" drive, but used it's own proprietary disks with just 100K characters of storage per disk! (compared to a dreamy 512K characters of the later machine seen here with the standard 3.25" disk drive.) Yes it was slow, but as my very first experience of word processing at home, it was still thrilling to use. I remember printing off assignments taking forever and the noise of that daisy wheel printer echoing around the house. I also remember how expensive it was to run. The cartridge holding the typewriter tapes were forever running out as the plastic ribbon only had one pass under the daisy wheel. You could buy circulating fabric ribbons but the quality wasn't as good and soon started to fade. Add to this the expense of the correction tapes and the disks and this was not a cheap beast to run! The 100K disks came in packs of 2 for around £10 (about $13) Wow! Nevertheless, this machine served me well for three years before I upgraded to the legendary Amstrad PCW9512 in 1992. (You should make a video about that awesome machine! To give you some idea why machines like these had a market, when I upgraded again in 1993 to my first proper Windows PC with its 386SX processor and 40MB hard drive (yes MB not GB) it cost me around £1000!!! Unbelievable!

[@brian9731]

My mother who is now 85 was in her prime as a secretary in the 70s and 80s. I remember she had her own manual typewriter, a hefty Remington thing which fascinated me as a child. At work she had a succession of increasingly sophisticated typewriters from manual to golf ball electric to word processor. And the pièce de resistance, a VT100 dumb terminal on connected presumably by some kind of serial data line to a DEC VAX VMS mainframe computer running word processing software. The print-out was collected from down the corridor in the printing room. I honestly don't remember what the printer was in those days but it was probably very noisy and used continuous paper which had to be ripped into sheets and have the sprocket holes ripped off too! These days she has a laptop which bamboozles her regularly but she has just about managed to use Zoom during the current lockdown. Thank goodness for TeamViewer remote support!

[@wranglerboi]

I'm amazed that you (or anyone) even has one of these machines. This is exactly what I used my first year of teaching! It was unquestionably faster than my hunt-and-peck method of typing PLUS it allowed me to correct errors "on the fly." It was both a time and headache saver since I often had to do many duplicate copies of a single document. Using the standard carbon paper sheets of the time on a standard typewriter meant that even one mistake in the document required retyping EVERYTHING all over again. With this machine, I could type and edit the document into memory, save it to disk, and then type as many copies as I wanted after that--using carbon paper--to perfection! A year later Apple came out with their APPLE I computer (which was quickly replaced by the Apple II) with it's true word "processing" capability--and this machine became an overnight dinosaur. But, either way, these became (for me) a true time saver--more because I only had to correct errors once (on my screen proof copy), and then I could make as many copies as needed, even if they were a week, month, or even year apart--thanks to the document's being saved on disk.

[@MaxPower-11]

You’re timing is a bit (ok, a lot) off 😂. These LCD-based word processors were popular in the late-1980s through the early 90s (the model featured in the video was introduced by Smith-Corona in 1991). The Apple I came out way before that… in 1976, and the Apple II in 1977.

[@dvdemon187]

Last year I actually had to repair two very similar machines from Brother: the LW-200 and LW-250. An elderly customer of mine still prefers them to her state-of-the-art office pc when it comes to certain tasks. Why? Because: BECAUSE

[@Xilog]

She just likes to do it the old way

[@b3h8t1n]

I'm the same way with my brother wp1700😏

[@tubebobwil]

I owned one, it got me through the first couple years of college! Loved it.

[@paulsmyers203]

We had one of those, or a member of its illustrious family. Dark days ... Thank you for typing on the actual typewriter - that was a pleasant trip down memory lane.

[@fsfs555]

Word processors were super popular in Japan up to the late '90s, from the early big CRT-based units to ones such as this to late model units that looked very similar to laptop PCs. I had an electric typewriter, a Canon TypeStar 4, that would queue a single line in memory for review/corrections on its built-in LCD, and then if you were satisfied you'd hit RETURN and it would print that line (using thermal transfer tape), allowing you to continue on to the next. It had a beep like this Smith-Corona model when you were nearing the end of the line.

[@candicestephens415]

Fun demo! Let me say though that the shift was not originally for lowering the basket, but for raising the carriage. Your Smith Corona Galazie that you used to demonstrate this feature is a later /modern change that made for a much lighter and easier on the fingers way to change the lower case to upper case. Before this change the whole carriage with platen and all had to be raised with the shift key and in many cases these carriages were very heavy and doing this repeatedly would be hard on the typist's fingers. By making the basket drop instead allowed for the same function with less muscle power and finger fatigue. I love your content and always like it when you are covering things that I have at least some knowledge about. Typewriters are one of those things, as I restore old typewriters and sewing machines.

[@SolventDonkey]

I remember my mum using a word processor for work and my sister getting one when she was at college as we didn't have a computer. Great video it brought back some memories

[@kommstein5692]

love how this is unscripted because of how most of it is based on his personal experience, and not only that, he presented it so well

[@rigilpaix]

AHA! A fellow They Might Be Giants fan! I saw two file names, “Palindrome” and “Birdhouse” and wondered, but when you opened Palindrome, it had the lyrics to I Palindrome I!

[@bordershader]

When I think about it, it makes perfect sense he'd be a TMBG fan. 👍👏👏

[@Derek_Read]

Even older versions of these typewriters (without screen / word processor / floppy storage) had most of the same typing functionality -- with the keyboards being almost identical for what I think was the "SL" series. This included the "Word Eraser" / "Line Eraser" key, and typeface modifiers (bold, sub, super, underline). That series also had spell check, with the Canadian versions of their "Spell Right Dictionary" having a three position button to switch between off / English / French, and it would beep in a similar way. You'd then use the "Word Eraser" key to remove the last word from the paper and reposition the typing wheel.

[@l.petriconi2647]

We had two of these in our family, from Olivetti. I wrote my masters thesis on it in 1999. I was happy with it, although while printing the thesis the printing cylinder became too hot, did not grab the paper anymore and came off somehow. I fixed it with Loctite and reduced the number of pages I printed to avoid too much heat. It was the last time I used the machine.

[@cjc363636]

I had a Brother version of this 25 years ago! It worked okay, but my lasting memory is the GRZZZZZZZZ of the 3.5 drive grinding away as it loaded files. Thanks for the memories!

[@easterntrees]

my mom bought a PWP 1400 sometime around 1991 or so. the display works very similar to yours here, but it's much, much smaller--one line of about forty characters is all the user can see at one time when they're editing a document in memory. no media drive is present, and saving is only available to the internal memory with no provisions for export. I have vivid memories of scrolling left for literal minutes while attempting to compose a three-page paper for middle school.

[@Reziac]

I had one very similar to yours (it was a Brother, don't recall the model number) -- two line screen and 25k of LINEAR memory, so to get anywhere you hadn't set a bookmark (IIRC it could set up to 10 bookmarks), it was scroll and scroll and scroll, and when memory got close to full it got so slow you could watch it pushing bytes uphill one at a time. It had permanent storage (tho no floppy drive) which at the time was fabulous. I used it for a long time after I got a PC because it could print a template that the PC could not (at least not without lots of futzing with advance codes in WordPerfect). Eventually the machine lost its marbles and began printing gibberish, and off to the recycler it went. I still have some of the printwheels.

[@jamestheotherone742]

Same here. I wrote entire short stories and homework assignments, 40 characters at a time. You have to remember the context of the time. It was a hell of a lot better than typing on paper and having to retype edits.

[@Xilog]

I have a rather modern brother actually, I think it was still being made up until recently. No storage, I don't know how much memory, and- no kidding, 1 by 16 display. There's type as you go or line-by line, which you type a whole line (it will refuse to go farther than the limit), and as you type it goes forward to show where you are. And once you're satisfied, hit enter and it prints the line. It actually has some nice features, and I occasionally power it up to see again.

[@TheFavorista]

Thanks for uploading this. I vaguely knew what they were thanks to an old Stephen King novel or story, but my family only owned a manual typewriter before our first home computer so I've never seen one of these in action. On a related note, we used to have an electric typewriter at work that wasn't a brand I'd heard of before (Swintec), so I looked it up online one day out of curiosity. Aside from that model (which looked thoroughly 80s) still being listed as actively manufactured, they had a menu item for "Word Processors". Turns out, for a mere $1,678.00 (!!!) in 2018 money you can still buy a Swintec 8500C "Word Processing System" with 3.5" floppy disk storage, 60K "Large Working Memory", and an 80-character by 25-line CRT! Amusingly, they also have a bright red warning that "this Product cannot be used to access the internet or to play games."

[@s0men00bb]

Actual product page with manual(s) included ! 😂 www.swintec.com/14-8500c.html

[@Xilog]

@@s0men00bb Thanks, that's hilarious. I want someone to buy one and keep it in their collection, a brand new 8500c!

[@mardus_ee]

Maybe there's a specialized department somewhere that uses those for the "no Internet" featureset.

[@MTLTV-eu4nv]

When I was in 7th grade, I had a vintage Royal mechanical typewriter (the type which does not use electricity), which my step grandmother gave me after I asked for a typewriter for my birthday (it was 1998, and typewriters were obsolete by then). I would put my worksheets into the typewriter, line the blank on the worksheet up to where the typewriter prints the letter, and type the answer into the blank. I, like you, found it cool to work with technology that was slightly older than modern-day. I guess I am not the only person in the world who finds certain pieces of obsolete technology cool. I do, though, remember my dad saying that I should use modern-day technology (what was considered modern when I was growing up in the late to mid 90's), such as a computer or a CD player (I also wanted found turntables to be a cool piece of technology, but my dad said that those were obsolete before I was born).

[@IDoNotLikeHandlesOnYT]

I was in high school at the same time, and here's my corresponding homework setup: My school upgraded the lab computers, and sold off the old ones. I bought a couple and set one up on the floor in the basement with an old CRT monitor, installed Ubuntu, and typed my homework there (using OpenOffice, I think), lying on the floor. Then, because that computer wasn't on the network (no Wi-Fi hardware in it, and no Ethernet in the basement back then), I had to use a flash drive to transfer the file to another computer if I wanted to print it at home. (I'd do the same to print it at school, but I'd have to do that even if I typed it on a reasonable computer.) I did one book report that way, and maybe an essay or two. I think my writing was of similar quality, thinking back on it.

[@nickstadler1906]

Beginning of the video: "This machine is slow." Me: "Slow? Ha! Clearly, this guy's never used a manual typewriter." Middle of video: (Pulls out an old manual typewriter)

[@areoants9453]

Even better when he actually started typing on it, with moderate speed to boot!

[@PinoyBowlerGS92]

Imagine a virus would get in the “Corona” Typewritter-Computer.

[@fun_ghoul]

@@PinoyBowlerGS92 It's not susceptible to viruses, but you could probably type up some grade A hysterical paranoia on it.

[@locke103]

@@ericolens3 ...not the worst thing i heard from an inept computer user, but it's just made my top five.

[@PanAndScanBuddy]

I imagined you pulling out your own manual typewriter like "I'll show you what slow is!"

[@AttilaTheHun333333]

I love the shelf in the background. Really nicely decorated!

[@BillReals]

Had one of these in college for my 1st year in college, it was cheaper than a computer. It had the uncanny ability to lose your "word processing" documents if you lose power and didn't save it. Finally straw was when I lost a 25 page paper on it because I forgot to save and we briefly lost power. Also, it was slow, like you pointed out. I bought a computer the next week.

[@digitaljestin]

I love that you have at least two files from high school containing They Might Be Giants lyrics.

[@Corlock78]

My sister had one of these in the late 80s to early 90s, she used it while applying to college. This was kind of a huge help in filling out college applications, as you could type into the forms, rather than hand write them, and type your essay into the field on the application as well, while being able to proof read everything ahead of time. Up until Acrobat, this was probably the best means of filling out forms with type available. Yes, you could use a standard typewriter, but you couldn't check your work ahead of time. Also, keep in mind, my sister was applying to college in the days before the Common Application, so every college had a unique application. Which made this type of machine very helpful.

[@labrat256]

I'm going through the Technology Connections back catalogue and I felt the need to whistle the tune of some "strikingly smooth jazz" at the end.

[@kleiton__]

That corona in the title pushed this back into my recommended, hell yeah

[@realshaoran4514]

Man, that was a trip into nostalgic land. I was using a mechanical typewriter for my school assignments well into the mid 90s, while my classmates were all using this thing called windows 95... I was so envious of them haha

[@tnate6004]

Although the sound of the old school Smith-Corona typewriter typing recalls sweat, industry and hard work, I do not miss having to change typewriter ribbons while trying to complete a term paper on a deadline. When returning a graded project to me, my senior English teacher wrote, "Where is this typewriter buried?". Still got an "A".

[@JamieStuff]

Re: the slow scrolling comments. This machine was an alternative to a PC/XT or clone (8088 machine), or maybe a PC/AT (80286 machine). The screen scrolling on those computers wasn't really much faster than this word processor. Plus, the cost of one of these word processors was not much more than a standalone letter quality (daisy wheel or "golf ball") printer. I remember using one of these in the mid-80s, and the word "slow" didn't come to mind at all.

[@Misha-dr9rh]

The sound that thing makes when it starts is the manliest thing i've ever heard. *(SLAM) (BUZZ) (CLUNK) (BUZZ)* If only it was powered by buff beard-wearing men shoveling coal into a steam engine.

[@acoolerhandle]

In a way, It could be, considering coal power plants are a thing.

[@Milamberinx]

I used the typewriter of the secretary in my dad's company a few times, it would have been an IBM Selectric with the golf ball. That thing was TERRIFYING.

[@qrstasdf6473]

1:15

[@_mikesacco]

"Corona" So relevant

[@Hansengineering]

delete this

[@Pidalin]

I wanted write that when I saw that, I didn't expect someone noticed that before. :-D

[@josephnevin]

@@Hansengineering wish I could but I'm all out of correction tape 😅😅

[@justuni8735]

i wonder why we got this recommendation......

[@MrGollum1996]

Hol up

[@RandomEskimo42]

Yay, more TMBG! I don't know why this makes me so happy!

[@TothefarDale]

I had been mulling the idea of starting a tech channel over in my head, but wasn’t sure about it. When I saw your paper with the date on it and you said that you were in high school at the time, I think it pushed me into the “I’m going to do this” camp. I really appreciate all of your content, and I wish you the beat. Thanks for doing what you do.

[@Intelwinsbigly]

Well, how did it go?

[@TothefarDale]

@@Intelwinsbigly I didn't do so. I whiled away my time getting into IT for a living and being annoyed by customers, essentially people being people. I still have a Curta Calculator that I would like to show the world, but I don't know when.

[@IanForsythWestCoast]

I remember the exact moment these came out and my office got an early IBM version. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced. It was REMEMBERING what I wrote! And this early version only allowed you to see and modify two lines of typing. Still, even with these primitive capabilities, it was head and shoulders above the garden variety typewriters we had been using for the last 60 or 70 years. Then, because I wanted desperately to be known as an early adopter (even though that term was not in use yet) I bought a unit similar to this one, except it was in two pieces, a tiny for the time “laptop” word processor, and a separate daisy wheel printer. This was so you could take the word processor with you to wherever you felt creative (as long as there was a plug nearby) and then print it when you got home. It was magic, and it would completely change my writing style. People who have grown up with word processing don’t realize what it was like back in the before times. With a regular typewriter, electric or manual, if you made one mistake on a page, and only discovered it while proofing the page, you would have to re-type the entire page WITH the correction of course. Most schools, of any level, would not accept papers that showed white-out had been used. Which meant that even if you caught your mistake immediately after making it, you would still have to re-type the page from the beginning, unless you had a really amazing correction ribbon, so the mistake would not be quite so obvious. The reason why word processing completely changed your, well certainly my, writing style, was because now I was’t trying to write the perfect sentence with perfect words, grammar, punctuation, and oh yeah, the creative idea we were doing this whole thing for. I could free associate, write what came into my head, fix anything or change anything later, even after printing it. It was magic. And made writing so much more fun and interesting, because the technology now worked for me rather than the other way around.

[@WhatCanSmith]

These were awesome...I used to type up dumb spec scripts as a kid and print them out on these...THE PRINTING IS FUN TO WATCH! 😊

[@godofcows4649]

If you couldn't afford a computer nor access it in university years ago, I bet this thing would have been a godsend back then

[@tut2tut2]

You're right, it was!

[@rydoggo]

2 years ago: huh this is cool Now: haha "corona" Me: no.... stop...

[@deusexaethera]

The coincidence really isn't that funny, I don't get why people keep saying it. Are people searching KZbin for any instance of the word "corona" just to make coronavirus-related comments on them?

[@rydoggo]

@@deusexaethera it really isn't funny. I'm saying people need to stop.

[@deusexaethera]

@@rydoggo: Oh, gotcha. Amazing how easy it is to misinterpret things. I thought you were telling the eerie coincidence to "stop".

[@locke103]

@@rydoggo it gets old. my hometown is also named corona, a melting pot within new york. super mario rpg, a few enemies had a spell named corona. seriously, people can screw off with... whatever this even is. i'd be hard pressed to even call this basic human stupidity.

[@ashkitt7719]

This typewriter killed gramgram

[@BartonChittenden]

When I was in high school, my family had an earlier Smith Corona PWP typewriter that had small entirely self contained tape cartridges rather than using a floppy drive -- each one was 32 or 64K. It also had a green phosphor screen rather than LCD. Thanks for taking me back. Also, nice TMBG reference.

[@javierbakat7289]

I used to have this at home, my mom "borrowed" it from her work while she worked at Polish Television.

[@floramaesarona1865]

Jess, you said, "off the cuff". Well played into the jacket theme. Great look for you host, nice way in clashing with an average tech look.

[@floridaredneck]

My S.C. PWP had a separate monitor and the screen on the typewriter was smaller, I guess since I had a monitor, you didn't need it. So you could read nearly a page and easily make corrections with the arrows and back button. It was so neat it made me want to write letters. It was really cool to sit back and watch it type. Sadly, I sent it to a friend when I got a PC and apparently there was a paper clip between the keys and it shorted out when he plugged it in. Things progress so rapidly now that we've become unimpressed with even the most sophisticated stuff. The PWPs were so groundbreaking compared to a typewriter, or at least they seemed that way at the time.

[@staticfanatic]

oh man, please tell me you're going to do more of these. LGR and 8-bit guy are great but the more the merrier!

[@timmowarner]

If you like this and 8-bit Guy you should check out Techmoan, too!

[@FoxMulder78]

And VWestlife.

[@tristanjacobucci]

My thoughts exactly and don't forget Techmoan

[@fiatlux8828]

8bitguy is too busy hoarding free shit to make videos that aren't kit builds

[@BertGrink]

and don't forget 'Obsolete Geek' and 'databits'

[@sergiomendez9231]

1. I love that you actually used this to write (and PRINT) some high school papers! 2. That explains the name of the shift key as well as the placement of the special characters! Normally, you would expect a default number or charater to be at the top (we read top down so you would expect the default to be first). In the case of the typewriter, the special characters were physically above the numbers, and so the keys simply matched the physical placement of the characters on the striker.

[@leoangeles8487]

I had the Brother version which I purchased in 1993 with a separate CRT monitor. Yes, all the printing mechanisms on these consumer models were slow. I talked my grandmother into buying me a Lexmark Wheelwriter 3500 after my first semester in College. I believe the cost of the machine was well over $1,000. I continue to use it to this day. Love, Love, Love the spring back mechanical keyboard which is what IBM Typewriters are known for. IBM sold the Typewriter UNIT to Lexmark in 1991 or so I believe. Office grade commercial Typewriters offered more features with one being the very rare and expensive parallel port adapter to hook up to a PC and use it as a text only printer. Even though still slow, a typewriter printed typeface yields superior clarity and crispness.

[@3PilaresDeOz]

That set is beautiful, man. Also I think it's better with the jacket.

[@ZGryphon]

Oh hey, my grandmother had one of these. It was the last in a long series of typewriters she had throughout her life. I might have it in my basement right now, in fact. I remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time, and it was a great sort of psychological bridge to the power of word processing for someone who had spent the previous 40+ years as a conventional typist. Switching straight from an electric typewriter to a PC would have been beyond the level of patience she had for technological change, but going from the Selectric to this to a PC worked.

[@DubleMeano]

This showed up ony newsfeed due to the word Corona. Stayed for the great presentation!

[@razordu30]

My family had one of these as a kid; that rapid fire typing sound takes me straight back to my childhood. I swear I can smell it.

[@faupsy1012]

Love your channel. You called that hybrid slow multiple times. I remember people using those when I worked in the financial aid office of WMU in 1987. Only the most preferred employees got them because they were the high tech of the time. That is, they were the fastest thing in 1987 apart from a computer, which were comparatively expensive. Wow, what a memory.

[@nicholasbodley2238]

Regording terminology, the carriage carries the paper and moves it sidewise. What shifts is the type bavket, almost sure.

[@Cotonetefilmmaker]

that noise of the thing typing on its own is amazing.

[@kylehazachode]

Lol loading text is still faster than the text boxes in Ocarina of Time.

[@johnkolk]

You’re not wrong

[@keiyakins]

Even the printer is faster than Pokemon Diamond and Pearl

[@packardcaribien]

I wanted to make fun of the nerdiness of your high school assignment, but Twelve Angry Men is one of my most favorite movies.

[@wilkgr]

We used it last year for school, and it's a great movie.

[@thethrashyone]

I was shown that movie in both middle and high school, oddly enough. It is a good movie to be sure. I distinctly remember my English teacher in high school cracking a joke that "if this movie were made today, it'd probably be called 'Seven Angry Men and Five Pissed Off Women'."

[@kaygee301]

I love how you didn't cut while it was thinking giving us a real sense of how it would be to use it

[@lordvlygar2963]

So, I'm sure this will be lost in a sea of comments on a years old video; I'm just kind of hoping for a video or videos on typewriters. I love the old manaul typewriters because: 1/3 of me used typewriters for school and letters until the computer took over, 1/3 of me enjoys working with machinery and the physical feedback they give, 1/3 of me is a big fan of a certain video game series that involves old typewriters. The way this channel goes into depth of everything, I feel I would love a whole history/education on the manual and electronic kinds. I know I can find videos explaining typewriters already on YT, but, well, I don't wanna. I want the dry humor and snarky attitude along with the lesson.