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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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