IBM Selectric Typewriter

My father was a typewriter repairman, and his specialty was fixing the Selectric. It was quite lucrative -- these things were expensive enough to be worth repairing and were as important to companies as Internet is now. When I was 10, however, we were watching the Super Bowl and the infamous Apple 1984 advertisement came on TV. My dad immediately realized he was doomed. He went out and bought the Mac on the first day it was available. We brought it home. I plugged it in, turned it on, and my faster saw WYSIWYG for the first time in the text editor. The first words out of his mouth were "oh, shit." I went to print the document and it didn't work -- the initial batch of printer cables were incorrect. When we got the new printer cable from the store the next week, my dad decided to change professions and focused on real estate.

A couple years ago, while working toward a creative writing/publishing MFA, I found an IBM Selectric II on Craigslist. I'd done all my writing on computers up to that point, but I loved the idea of using a typewriter for first drafts. There was something romantic about the idea. It seemed like a more intimate way to write.

Its owner was a retiree moving to Florida. He'd bought it in the late 60s to write his dissertation but hadn't used it since. It had sat in a corner of his office under its original dust cover for forty years, though he'd had it serviced a few months earlier.

The first thing I noticed was the weight of the thing when I carried it out to my car. It's a tank. The second thing I noticed was the sound it made when I brought it home and switched it on. There was no mistake I was dealing with a piece of machinery, humming, waiting for me to get to work. It looked great, too.

As soon as I sat down to write, I worried that it would bother my neighbors. My apartment walls were thin enough that I could hear anything louder than a cough, so when I discovered that typing each letter was like firing a cannon, it was clear that late-night writing sessions were out of the picture unless I wanted to make enemies.

But I was right about using it for first drafts. On the computer, it's easy to second-guess myself, go back, change things, and re-write too much before the story is even finished. A first draft is supposed to be the shitty, rough, inconsistent sketch of a thing, and my Selectric forces me to press onward. It's awesome. Each key press is satisfying, each carriage return is a mechanical thunk that lets me know I'm making progress. Watching pages stack up on the desk next to it is a reward itself.

I still do my rewrites and edits on my computer, copying from the typed pages, but I'm so happy that I have this monster machine to keep me honest and get the first versions of stories down.

Just bought myself a Seletric II off of Ebay a couple weeks ago. The thing is magnificent. The only electrical component is the motor running the driveshaft, otherwise all of the operations are mechanical. For example, pressing a key makes the type head pitch and yaw to the proper character, then lifts and slams it against the paper, all within a few dozen milliseconds, and that whole process is done with just levers and pulleys (clutching off the driveshaft, too, I'm sure). There's even a buffer mechanism, so that if you hit a key while the type mechanism is in the middle of printing the previous character, it's actually "stored" in this buffer until the print head is done with that cycle. AND, if the buffer is full (I believe it only stores one character), then all the keys are locked to prevent any mishaps.

And the maintainability of the thing is pretty nifty - you can take the cover off, and then lift and slide the guts up from the base[0] to stand upright with the bottom facing you. All by-design, since of course such mechanical objects require regular lubrication and other maintenance.

[0] See this video (I linked to 3:35, but the whole thing is cool): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

This device is worth a test run, just to know what it was like to type with the best of the best equipment 30 years ago.

Comparing it to other typewriters, imagine firing a gatling gun when you've been writing with revolvers. It feels like your words are typed ahead of when you think of them.

I used a Selectric with a copy machine for class projects and messing around, then my family got a mac ha ha.

I worked at IBM in 1987. My group's secretary was AMAZING! I remember walking up to her one day. She could talk to me in English, chat to her girlfriend on the phone in Spanish and type a hundred words a minute on the Selectric through her dictation headphone simultaneously and not miss a beat. Simply amazing!

I wrote my papers in college with one of these, then used them in my first job in a newspaper newsroom. I'll never forget the noise of 100 typewriters hammering away before the deadline. A modern newsroom seems like a tomb in comparison.

Using a typewriter was like taking photos with a film camera. Each page required such an investment that you worked really hard to get it right the first time. Then on the second draft, since you had to retype everything anyway, you were a lot more likely to completely recast a passage that needed it, instead of just moving words around a bit. I think typewriters made me a better writer.

I wonder if the designers of the Model M keyboard used the Selectric as an inspiration.

Seems like the "golfball" would make a pretty cool novelty shifter.

There is nothing like a Selectric's keyboard. Bought one in the early 2000s, disconnected from the internet for a year, moved out into the woods and typed on nothing but the Selectric. Never did get around to writing the great American novel though.

Oh and this is pretty nifty. http://hackaday.com/2012/06/13/turning-an-ibm-selectric-into...

I always wondered if back in the days of typewriters there was a similar conversation going as there's today about keyboards.

Where there the IBM, Apple 2, Das keyboard fans?

My favorite text editor font (Letter Gothic) was originally designed for the Selectric.

http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/downloads/monotype/letter_goth... (that link isn't the monospaced variant, don't get it, but a good visual representation)

I learned to type on a Selectric in high school a few years back (maybe more than a few, actually).

The thing I remember about them, besides the hum, is the smell -- a warm machine oil scent.

I should probably get one of these while they're still commonly available in working condition.

We had one at home when I was in high school. Loved that thing. Abandoned it when we got a PC, but we got a printer that worked the same way. It was a big step up from dot matrix output, back before laser printers and inkjets.

I learned how to type on one of these in high school. Ah, the good old days...

I always thought the way the golf ball moved, at speed, was pure magic.

This is why I like my Das Keyboard so much. :)

The first computer I learned to program, an IBM 1130, had a Selectric as the console.