The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer | Hacker News Reader

The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer

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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.

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

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.

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.

The Mag Card was essentially a word processor, and did not compete with the MT/SC. But IBM also introduced a Mag Card Composer, which did. There really were two very different use cases: general-purpose word processing one one hand, and composition on the other hand. The latter implied proportional spacing, justification, good-looking fonts, and accessories such as high-quality paper and specially-formulated ribbons.

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...

Author of the posts here. There most definitely was a market, which ended only with the advent of cheaper computer-based solutions. Think magazines and small publications. The goal here was not to print a lot, but to produce a single instance of proportional, right-margin-justified, high-quality output that was ready for photocomposition. The output also definitely didn't look typewritten, but it looked as neat as what you would see in a magazine.

I remember encountering one of these machines in 1973 or 74 when I was on the high school newspaper staff. We visited another high school in our district that had one and I watched it output beautiful proportional, justified newspaper column-width text. I was amazed.

Great experience. I love to hear stories of people who actually used or saw these machines in use.

I just wish I knew what I was looking at at the time!

Selectric typewriters made something that looked more like print than the typical typewriter. The Selectric type ball mechanism made multiple rapid impressions, producing a crisp dark letter, and the high end models had proportional typefaces. The Composer could even do justification.

An example of Selectric Composer output: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/images/ps_sco2.jpg

Wikipedia has a print sample from the Composer system:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Sample_o...

on their Selectric page:

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

> The Selectric type ball mechanism made multiple rapid impressions

Not sure if this is what you mean but no, the type element would just hit the paper through the ribbon once. The crispness comes entirely from the formulation of the carbon film ribbon.

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.

Absolutely! You had to get basically the same content to all the Glengarry leads, keep broadening your chain mail down line, tremendous opportunity to sell something that changes the paradigm of how a business can scale in the pre computer era.

A guy on YouTube has a tape system: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-Ne8CAbcaMk

There's more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWef9lfudAA

This is an MT/ST Model IV. It's been on eBay for a long time, but the guy doesn't seem eager to sell it. The videos are cool though, because they show the details of the machine, including it's relays bank. The typewriter is missing at least it top cover. It would be great to work on this system, but somehow it should be acquired first ($1,000 < price <= $30,000).

I tried to edit 80-page book on paper tape in 1977. It was more than 10 rolls weighing 10 kilos. Finnish Government said NO to such waste.

So I edited it on 8 kilo core memory holding few pages, hoping that the core stays intact overnight.

Final blow was when professor doubted if he can accept thesis written by a computer. Because it was little bit like cheating.

I was still getting this in middle school in 1990, when several teachers refused to accept anything printed from a computer because "the computer wrote it, not you".

Funny that now we live in an age where their complaint might actually be valid.

looks amazing!

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