Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023)

kutilek.de

79 pointstangus9 comments

I love the crazy design of the rotating ball mechanism of theses things. For it to be able to do complex typesetting without the appearance of mono spacing is really cool. Normally you would need a printing press for it to look this good back then. Naturally it's all solved via software now, but purely mechanical implementations are endlessly fascinating to me.

To see it in action:

https://youtube.com/shorts/D5d_L37Gd8A

These "golf balls" are amazing: I found a NIB set (New In Box) of a few of them on a garage sale a few years ago. Bought it immediately: it's one of the geekiest thing I own. I sadly (or thankfully, wife-acceptance-factor would be low) don't have the typewriter to go with it.

I've got fond memories, as a child, of my father at home typing on an IBM Selectric typewriter while smoking cigarette after cigarette. Good memories.

Wasn't this used decades before Selectric? The Blickensderfer typewriter, for example. I wonder why single-element designs vanished for a long time.

I wouldn't claim that the Bliensderfer's "barrel" design is the same as the "golf ball" of IBMs, but as with all things nothing is created in a vacuum; the IBM Selectric is an incremental improvement. It's like saying an Palm Pilot is the same as an iPhone.

I used to use one of these for typesetting back when I was a printer. To justify, you had to type each line once in non-printing mode. Then you told the machine to retype it in printing mode and it would widen the spaces the correct amount. Or maybe you had to retype it manually again; I forget.

Anyway the output was much better than from an ordinary Selectric because of proportional letter widths.

As I recall, the features in the Selectric where what sank the Killian documents forgery a few years ago. Even the Selectric (which was the defense about claiming that the proportionally spaced document that was produced perfectly out of Microsoft word with default settings) couldn't do some of the existing things that word did by default, but it was still a technical marvel for its day.

How far IBM has fallen.

I was school newspaper editor in high school, back in 1973-74. We didn't have a Composer, but one of the other high schools did, and they produced the output we pasted up. I went to their school to see the Composer in action once, it was amazing to see our copy typed in, then magically reappear as properly spaced and justified columns.

These bring back memories. When I was young, my dad was a computer engineer for Olivetti and he used to bring all sorts of weird and wonderful printers and plotters home. We had a drawer of these golf balls in the garage and I used to play with them, throwing them about in the garden. I was fascinated by them.

Despite already owning a computer, I recall being amazed when my mom bought a typewriter that had a built-in whiteout strip and you could literally hit “backspace” and it would white out your previous characters.

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