Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com