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.