Comment by YesThatTom2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by YesThatTom2 | Hacker News Reader

Suppose you regularly mailed hundreds or thousands of people. How would you do it in the 1970s and 1980s? (i.e. before your office had a PC)

Method 1: have a secretarial pool type them all out each time

Method 2: if you were lucky enough to have a photocopier, keep the list on paper and photocopy them into labels. How do you delete someone? Whiteout that square. How do you add a new address? Find a recently blanked out square

By the way… in the 1980s nearly every company bought at least one PC. Why? To manage their customer mailing lists and print labels. It was a BFD when you consider how inefficient Method 1 and 2 were.

Fun fact: Reagan got elected promising to “run Government like a business” (meaning … efficient). After 12 years of Reagan/Bush, the Clinton administration was surprised to find the previous administration was using “Method 1”… not even Method 2!! Mr. “Run Government like a business” didn’t do the modernizing step that all video adds had done in those 12 years.

I worked as a secretary in a brokerage firm in 1987. They had electronic typewriters with name/address storage and mail merge functionality. I'm sure PCs must've come in only a few years later, but it was definitely possible before then.

IBM selectrics were essentially word processors. The input and output made an easy transition into the current office environment. Paper and a rollerball was far superior to any printer or monitor I saw in those days.

Earlier Selectrics were completely electromechanical, with no storage or word processing features. They were just electric typewriters with a different mechanism. I learned to type on one in high school, the summer before taking my first programming course, when they were still teaching typing on electric typewriters and there were about eight terminals total on the campus PDP-11.

The Selectric wasn't the only single-element typewriter design. There was also a Triumph-Adler design which used a cylindrical type element instead of a ball.

Thank you, I think the Selectric is a pretty interesting device. Your story makes it sound like the role earlier filled by the Friden Flexowriter. I imagine it was pretty easy for the Selectric to out do the Flexowriter for most things and the output could be easily duplicated at a certain point.

Any insight on friden flexowriter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter

Flexowriter was VERY before my time. State-of-the-art circa 1980 was the DEC LA120 (DECWriter III), a dot-matrix printing terminal with a logic-seeking printhead that absolutely smoked the neighboring LA36.

There were Selectrics set up as terminals, though, as the mechanism was well-suited for it. I think IBM called it a 2741. I never saw such a beast, though.

All that was needed to make a Selectric into a terminal was essentially a box to take the electrical signals of hitting the keys (that triggered the correct letter on the ball to strike the ribbon) and amplify/send them to an interface into a device that could take TTY. Early word-processors and cold-type machines used this since those Selectrics were ubiquitous and dang durable.

The other big tech news about the young Clinton Whitehouse was the George Stephanopoulos<sp?) used a pager.

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