[HN Gopher] The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer
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The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer
Author : kens
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-07-05 02:02 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.bruchez.name)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.bruchez.name)
| daoistmonk wrote:
| looks amazing!
| tdeck wrote:
| Here's an old ad for a later model - the IBM Magnetic Card
| Selectric typewriter - it demonstrates the functionality pretty
| well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW_jJjUarp0
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I love how after Jane has her copy digitally recorded on the
| mag card -- she then manually writes metadata on its folder,
| and files it away...
|
| The future was then, it just wasn't very evenly distributed.
| dano wrote:
| My father, an attorney, made extensive use of the magcard
| selectric. He did wills and trusts which required revision
| based on client feedback or life changes. The ability to edit
| the document from a saved copy was revolutionary in the early
| 70's. It also supported stop codes so that the system would
| print, stop, allow for manual entry of a name or other text,
| and continue. The client would receive a correction free typed
| document (no whiteout). All these capabilities are normal after
| the advent of Wordstar, WordPerfect, Word and others. Having
| typed school papers on this system helped me understand
| computers early on.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Hard to believe there was enough demand for such a thing that it
| was economically viable -- I guess if you had a secretary that
| had to produce a _lot_ of copies of virtually the same text, and
| you wanted it to look genuinely typewritten and not pre-
| printed... maybe...
| nxobject wrote:
| If you didn't want to shell out for actual typesetting, there
| might have been a market for smaller organizations that wanted
| to produce camera-ready copy in-house for printing elsewhere.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| I used a later derivative of this concept to produce a book while
| at university. It consisted of a Selectric typewriter with a
| solenoid-driven interface which connected to a metal box
| containing a compact cassette mechanism and a few buttons. Type a
| line, make corrections and hit the carriage return key upon which
| the result is stored on cassette tape. Recorded lines could be
| edited, ed-style by replacing sections (characters or words) with
| new content. Once stored the thing could be used to produce many
| copies of the same content with pauses for manually typing in
| addresses etc.
|
| I used it to produce a whole book during which the typewriter
| motor died just after having typed in the whole thing and just
| before I was going to have it 'print' the text so we could cut
| and paste it on stand sheets for offset reproduction. I managed
| to find a working motor which I installed in the machine upon
| which I had to re-adjust the whippletree mechanism which aims the
| ball since the characters ended up everywhere except for where
| they needed to be. Those were a few intense hours since I had to
| go by intuition on how this all worked, not having access to a
| service manual and this being long before the time when you'd
| just go on the 'net to find one. I got it adjusted and got the
| book printed by feeding the typewriter with paper and the device
| with cassette tapes, telling it to print a page, feeding in a new
| sheet, next page, next cassette tape, etc.
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