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110-449: Elements of the design date to the 1920s, and variants of the machine were produced until the early 1970s; the machines found a variety of uses during the evolution of office equipment in the 20th century, including being among the first electric typewriters, computer input and output devices, forerunners of modern word processing, and also having roles in the machine tool and printing industries. The Flexowriter can trace its roots to some of

220-414: A "remote control" mechanism allowing one typewriter to control another or to record and play back typed data through a parallel data connection with one wire per typewriter key. The Electromatic tape perforator used a wide tape, with punch position per key on the keyboard. In 1932, a code for the paper tape used to drive Linotype and other typesetting machines was standardized . This allowed use of

330-631: A , e , i , o and u to produce á , é , í , ó and ú , reducing the number of sorts needed from 5 to 1. The typebars of "normal" characters struck a rod as they moved the metal character desired toward the ribbon and platen, and each rod depression moved the platen forward the width of one character. Dead keys had a typebar shaped so as not to strike the rod. In English-speaking countries, ordinary typewriters printing fixed-width characters were standardized to print six horizontal lines per vertical inch, and had either of two variants of character width, one called pica for ten characters per horizontal inch and

440-522: A 24-channel punched paper tape . It executed the current instruction and then read the next one. A separate tape could contain numbers for input, but the tape formats were not interchangeable. Instructions could not be executed from the storage registers. Because instructions were not stored in working memory, it is widely claimed that the Harvard Mark I was the origin of the Harvard architecture . However, this

550-426: A century. When reproducing form letters from punched tape, the considerable speed and loud sound of the device made watching it a somewhat frightening experience. Towards the bottom of the unit there was a large rubber roller ("power roll") that rotated continuously at a few hundred rpm. It provided power for typing as well as power-operated backspace, type basket shift, and power for engaging (and probably disengaging)

660-504: A cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented, which was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize for his invention at both exhibitions. The first typewriter to be commercially successful

770-550: A device was also referred to as a type writer . The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices in the United States until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It was widely used by professional writers, in offices, in business correspondence in private homes, and by students preparing written assignments. Typewriters were

880-492: A few inches in depth. The ASCC used 500 miles (800 km) of wire with three million connections, 3,500 multipole relays with 35,000 contacts, 2,225 counters, 1,464 tenpole switches and tiers of 72 adding machines, each with 23 significant numbers. It was the industry’s largest electromechanical calculator. The enclosure for the Mark I was designed by futuristic American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes at IBM's expense. Aiken

990-421: A firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks, which would eventually result in the creation of Remington Rand and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter. In 1928, Delco , a division of General Motors , purchased Northeast Electric, and

1100-483: A management vacuum and could not complete contract negotiations, so Northeast began work on their own electric typewriter. In 1929, they started selling the Electromatic . In 1931, Northeast was bought by Delco . Delco had no interest in a typewriter product line, so they spun the product off as a separate company called Electromatic. Around this time, Electromatic built a prototype automatic typewriter. This device used

1210-519: A manufacturer of sewing machines ) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer . This was the origin of the term typewriter . Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York . It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which, because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. As with most other early typewriters, because

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1320-600: A paper-tape reader and punch created the basic foundation for what would become the Flexowriter. By the late 1930s, IBM had a nearly complete monopoly on unit record equipment and related punched card machinery, and expanding the product line into automatic typewriters equipped with paper tape raised antitrust issues. As a result, IBM sold the product line and factory to the Commercial Controls Corporation (CCC) of Rochester, New York , which also absorbed

1430-435: A patent application for a typewriter that could print justified and proportionally spaced text. This required recording each line of text on a paper tape before it was printed. IBM experimented with a 12-hole paper tape compatible with their punched-card code . Eventually, IBM settled on a six-hole encoding, as documented in their automatic justifying typewriter patents filed in 1945. Equipping an electric typewriter with both

1540-457: A standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. After that, they began to be largely supplanted by personal computers running word processing software. Nevertheless, typewriters remain common in some parts of the world. For example, typewriters are still used in many Indian cities and towns, especially in roadside and legal offices, due to a lack of continuous, reliable electricity. The QWERTY keyboard layout , developed for typewriters in

1650-425: A tape containing the text to be typeset, it turned on a lamp easily seen by the operator to show that the text on the line being typed could be typeset—it was within justifiable range. The LCC had a four-wheel rotary escapement , and a set of gears between the carriage rack and the escapement, to permit the smallest unit of spacing at the escapement to be quite small at the carriage. The spring-tensioned tape that moved

1760-591: A tape only five to seven holes wide to drive automatic typewriters, teleprinters and similar equipment. In 1933, IBM wanted to enter the electric typewriter market, and purchased the Electromatic Corporation, renaming the typewriter the IBM Model 01 , and continuing to use the Electromatic trademark. IBM experimented with several accessories and enhancements for its electric typewriter. In 1942, IBM filed

1870-479: A team at Los Alamos that used "modified IBM punched-card machines" to determine the effects of the implosion. In March 1944, he proposed to run certain problems regarding implosion of the Mark I, and in 1944 he arrived with two mathematicians to write a simulation program to study the implosion of the first atomic bomb . The Los Alamos group completed its work in a much shorter time than the Cambridge group. However,

1980-406: A volume of 816 cubic feet (23 m ) – 51 feet (16 m) in length, 8 feet (2.4 m) in height, and 2 feet (0.61 m) deep. It weighed about 9,445 pounds (4.7 short tons; 4.3 t). The basic calculating units had to be synchronized and powered mechanically, so they were operated by a 50-foot (15 m) drive shaft coupled to a 5 horsepower (3.7 kW) electric motor, which served as

2090-476: A wide roll of paper, similar to a player piano roll. For each key on the typewriter, there was a column on the roll of paper. If the key was to be pressed, then a hole was punched in the column for that key. The Electromatic typewriter patents document the use of pivoted spiral cams operating against a hard rubber drive roller to drive the print mechanism. This was the foundation of essentially all later electric typewriters. The typewriter could be equipped with

2200-646: A workable design. Some early typing instruments include: By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need to mechanize the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record). From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented

2310-422: Is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys , and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against the paper with a type element . Thereby, the machine produces a legible written document composed of ink and paper. By the end of the 19th century, a person who used such

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2420-647: Is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors. After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for

2530-737: Is disputed in The Myth of the Harvard Architecture published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , which shows the term 'Harvard architecture' did not come into use until the 1970s (in the context of microcontrollers) and was only retrospectively applied to the Harvard machines, and that the term could only be applied to the Mark III and IV , not to the Mark I or II . The main sequence mechanism

2640-513: The Friden Computyper . Computypers were electromechanical; they had no electronics, at least in their earlier models. The calculator mechanism, inside a desk-like enclosure, was much like a Friden model STW desktop calculator, except that it had electrical input (via solenoids) and output (low-torque rotary switches on the dial shafts) . A product known as the Justowriter (or Just-O-Writer )

2750-555: The Hansen Writing Ball , which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices on the European continent as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models, which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. The Hansen Writing Ball

2860-515: The Harvard Mark II (1947 or 1948), Mark III/ADEC (September 1949), and Harvard Mark IV (1952) – all the work of Aiken. The Mark II was an improvement over the Mark I, although it still was based on electromechanical relays . The Mark III used mostly electronic components — vacuum tubes and crystal diodes —but also included mechanical components: rotating magnetic drums for storage, plus relays for transferring data between drums. The Mark IV

2970-468: The Manhattan Project , and needed to determine whether implosion was a viable choice to detonate the atomic bomb that would be used a year later. The Mark I also computed and printed mathematical tables, which had been the initial goal of British inventor Charles Babbage for his analytical engine in 1837. According to Edmund Berkeley , the operators of the Mark I often called the machine "Bessy,

3080-519: The font . In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a typeset page, an effect that was further enhanced by including the 1937 innovation of carbon-film ribbons that produced clearer, sharper words on

3190-403: The registers associated with the input, output , and arithmetic units were assigned a unique identifying index number. These numbers were represented in binary on the control tape. The first field was the binary index of the result of the operation, the second was the source datum for the operation and the third field was a code for the operation to be performed. In 1928 L.J. Comrie

3300-441: The 1870s, remains the de facto standard for English-language computer keyboards . The origins of this layout still need to be clarified. Similar typewriter keyboards, with layouts optimised for other languages and orthographies, emerged soon afterward, and their layouts have also become standard for computer keyboards in their respective markets. Although many modern typewriters have one of several similar designs, their invention

3410-425: The 2210 and 2211, on which the function keys were replaced with a numeric keypad , and the 2261, using ASCII instead of the proprietary eight-bit code used by other members of the 2200 family. The 2300 series were cosmetically similar to the 2200 series, although without the function keys or numeric keypad, with a simplified plugboard, and operating at 145 words per minute (12 characters per second). In addition to

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3520-580: The Bar-Let and the Corona No. 3 Typewriter have two separate shift keys, a "CAP" shift (for uppercase) and a "FIG" shift (for numbers and symbols). The Murray code was developed for a teletypewriter with a similar three-row typewriter keyboard. To facilitate typewriter use in business settings, a tab (tabulator) key was added in the late nineteenth century. Before using the key, the operator had to set mechanical "tab stops", pre-designated locations to which

3630-719: The Bessel engine", after Bessel functions . The Mark I was disassembled in 1959; part of it was given to IBM, part went to the Smithsonian Institution , and part entered the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments . For decades, Harvard's portion was on display in the lobby of the Aiken Computation Lab. About 1997, it was moved to the Harvard Science Center . In 2021, it was moved again, to

3740-668: The CNC machine tool industry abandoned paper tape, although this was significantly slower because of the long working life of machine tools. From its earliest days through to at least the mid-1960s, Flexowriters were used as automatic letter writers. While the US White House was using them during the Second World War, in the 1960s, United States Members of Congress used Flexowriters extensively to handle enormous volumes of routine correspondence with constituents; an advantage of this method

3850-616: The Mark ;I were computing pioneers Richard Milton Bloch , Robert Campbell, and Grace Hopper . There was also a small technical team whose assignment was to actually operate the machine; some had been IBM employees before being required to join the Navy to work on the machine. This technical team was not informed of the overall purpose of their work while at Harvard. The 24 channels of the input tape were divided into three fields of eight channels each. Each storage location, each set of switches, and

3960-590: The National Postal Meter Corporation. CCC was formed by several former IBM employees. Around the time of World War II , CCC developed a proportional spacing model of the Flexowriter known as The Presidential (or sometimes the President ). The model name was derived from the fact that these units were used to generate the White House letters informing families of the deaths of service personnel in

4070-536: The Simplex Typewriter Company made index typewriters for 1/40 the price of a Remington typewriter. The index typewriter's niche appeal however soon disappeared as, on the one hand new keyboard typewriters became lighter and more portable, and on the other refurbished second-hand machines began to become available. The last widely available western index machine was the Mignon typewriter produced by AEG which

4180-551: The US Navy Bureau of Ships in May and was officially presented to the university on August 7, 1944. Although not the first working computer , the machine was the first to automate the execution of complex calculations, making it a significant step forward for computing. The ASCC was built from switches , relays , rotating shafts , and clutches . It used 765,000 electromechanical components and hundreds of miles of wire, comprising

4290-461: The United States—but before the advent of daisywheel and electronic machines—the typewriter market faced strong competition from less expensive typewriters from Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan. In most of the early typewriters, the typebars struck upward against the paper, pressed against the bottom of the platen , so the typist could not see the text as it

4400-425: The amount of carriage movement for the current character. They were operated by the cams. However, the Flexowriter's mechanical encoder was a very different and far more rugged design, although still operated by the cams. Flexowriters (at least those prior to 1969) do not have transistors ; electrical control operations were done with telephone-style (E-Class) relays , and troubleshooting often involved problems with

4510-515: The atomic bomb. He showed that the implosion design, which would later be used in the Trinity and Fat Man bombs, was likely faster and more efficient than the gun design." Aiken published a press release announcing the Mark I listing himself as the sole inventor. James W. Bryce was the only IBM person mentioned, even though several IBM engineers including Clair Lake and Frank Hamilton had helped to build various elements. IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson

Friden Flexowriter - Misplaced Pages Continue

4620-411: The basic 2301, the 2302 supported the auxiliary tape readers and punches from the 2200 family. The 2304 offered proportional spacing and a carbon ribbon mechanism, making it suitable for preparing camera-ready copy. The base price for the 2300 family was £1400 (British pounds). This would be the last hurrah for the line, with production halting in the early 1970s. Sales and innovation declined. In

4730-417: The basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying

4840-403: The cam's frame slightly (clockwise in the photo) to operate the typing linkage for that character. As the cam continued to rotate, the spring-loaded lever pushed on the pin to move it toward home position, but if the key were still down, the cam (now out of contact with the power roll) stalled because the projection on the cam would catch on another part of the release lever. The cam stalled until

4950-569: The carriage had far more tension (possibly 20 lbs?) than did a standard Flexowriter. American Type Founders produced a phototypesetter based on the Justowriter/Flexowriter platform. There was an "accounting" model with an ultra-wide carriage and two-color ribbon for printing out wide financial reports. The Friden accounting model was called "5010 COMPUTYPER" and was capable of arithmetic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication & division) at electronic speeds and to print

5060-424: The carriage return clutch. Referring to the photo of the cam assembly (often simply called a cam; it was not meant to be disassembled), the holes in the side plates at the lower left were for the assembly's pivot rod, which was fixed to the frame. At the extreme upper left was part of a disconnectable pivot that pulled down on the typing linkage. As installed, "down" was to the right in the photo. Referring again to

5170-429: The carriage would advance when the tab key was pressed. This facilitated the typing of columns of numbers, freeing the operator from the need to manually position the carriage. The first models had one tab stop and one tab key; later ones allowed as many stops as desired, and sometimes had multiple tab keys, each of which moved the carriage a different number of spaces ahead of the decimal point (the tab stop), to facilitate

5280-498: The computer system the machine was being used with. Computers that used Flexowriters as consoles include: The Whirlwind I deployment in 1955 is notable as it seems to have been the first time that a typewriter-like input device was directly connected to a general-purpose electronic computer, becoming directly ancestral to today's computer keyboards. Flexowriters could also be used as offline punches and printers. Programmers would type their programs on Flexowriters, which would punch

5390-409: The concept that each key was attached to a typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inked fabric ), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical platen . The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing

5500-465: The cover-attachments; internally, the headless set-screws require fluted Bristol keys, which were not commonly available in Great Britain. There was a holder for a large roll of paper tape on the back of the unit, with tape feeding around to a punch on the left side, toward the rear. The tape reader was on the same side, toward the front, and was essentially identical to the reader shown on the front of

5610-475: The earliest electric typewriters . In 1925, the Remington Typewriter Company wanted to expand their offerings to include electric typewriters. Having little expertise or manufacturing ability with electrical appliances, they partnered with Northeast Electric Company of Rochester and made a production run of 2500 electric typewriters. When the time came to make more units, Remington was suffering

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5720-505: The electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletypewriter . The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910. James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what

5830-554: The electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker , invented by Thomas Edison in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line. Some electric typewriters were patented in the 19th century, but the first machine known to be produced in series is the Cahill of 1900. Another electric typewriter

5940-453: The fact that, unlike IBM's MT/ST tapes, Flexowriter users could cut and splice paper tapes, particularly if they could recognize some of the common codes such as carriage return. The Diablo daisy wheel printer , introduced in 1969, offered comparable print quality at twice the speed. Larger manufacturers such as IBM and DEC made their own console equipment, and video terminals began to appear, displacing paper-based systems. Eventually, even

6050-508: The far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed

6160-433: The final Singer models did make some use of plastics, even they were quite heavy compared to other electric typewriters of their time. As a result, the platen carriage was very heavy, and when the "Carriage Return" key was pressed, the carriage moved with about 20 pounds (9.1 kg) of force and enough momentum to injure a careless operator. If used only as manual typewriters, and properly maintained, Flexowriters might last

6270-583: The front side of the platen, became standard. One of the first was the Daugherty Visible, introduced in 1893, which also introduced the four-bank keyboard that became standard, although the Underwood which came out two years later was the first major typewriter with these features. A significant innovation was the shift key , introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either

6380-420: The index type--albeit with a very much larger index and number of type elements. Embossing tape label makers are the most common index typewriters today, and perhaps the most common typewriters of any kind still being manufactured. The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing the typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at

6490-411: The internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case , but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent, % , and ampersand, & . Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and typebar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above

6600-404: The key was released. When released, the lever would catch the projection so the cam was now in home position. This resembled a simple clock escapement , and prevented repeated typing. (The "key-down" anti-repeat stop could be removed, so that fast repetitive typing could be done, but this change was difficult to undo.) Carriage return was done by a non-stretch very durable textile tape attached to

6710-484: The keyboard. In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name Noiseless and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. Noiseless portables sold well in the 1930s and 1940s, and noiseless standards continued to be manufactured until the 1960s. In a conventional typewriter

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6820-422: The late 1940s. In fact, some Flexowriter parts were identical in fit and function to the early IBM electric typewriters (those with rotary carriage escapements, a gear-driven power roll, and a governor-controlled variable speed "universal" (wound-rotor/commutator) motor). The early IBM rotary-escapement proportional-spacing typewriters (three wheel rotary escapement, spur gear differentials) had code bars to control

6930-515: The late 1950s, CCC was purchased by Friden , a maker of electromechanical calculators, and it was under their name that the machines achieved their greatest diversity and success; applications are further detailed below. Two tape stations allowed implementation of what was then called the form letter , the combination of standard text (one tape) with varying name and address information (the other tape). Edwin Blodgett, Chief Engineer of Friden R&D,

7040-628: The late 1960s, the market for word processing equipment was shifting to magnetic media. IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) in 1964. In October, 1968, Information Control Systems introduced the Astrotype word processing system. Both of these used magnetic tape and Selectric print mechanisms. With its fixed type font and paper-tape recording medium, the Flexowriter had difficulty competing with these machines, although some Flexowriter documentation emphasized

7150-400: The linkage to type the character. This particular cam assembly had a cam that rotated a full turn for each operation; it might operate the backspace, basket shift, or carriage-return clutch disengage mechanism. Cams for typing characters rotated only half a turn, the halves being identical. Below the cam in this photo (hidden) was a spring-loaded lever that pushed against a pin on the cam. On

7260-598: The lobby of Harvard's new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, Massachusetts . The original concept was presented to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937. After a feasibility study by IBM engineers, the company chairman Thomas Watson Sr. personally approved the project and its funding in February 1939. Howard Aiken had started to look for a company to design and build his calculator in early 1937. After two rejections, he

7370-653: The main power source and system clock . From the IBM Archives: The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) was the first operating machine that could execute long computations automatically. A project conceived by Harvard University’s Dr. Howard Aiken, the Mark I was built by IBM engineers in Endicott, N.Y. A steel frame 51 feet long and 8 feet high held the calculator, which consisted of an interlocking panel of small gears, counters, switches and control circuits, all only

7480-414: The number of whose characters (sorts) was constrained by the physical limits of the machine, the number of keys required was reduced by the use of dead keys . Diacritics such as ´ ( acute accent ) would be assigned to a dead key , which did not move the platen forward, permitting another character to be imprinted at the same location; thus a single dead key such as the acute accent could be combined with

7590-410: The opposite direction. By 1900, notable typewriter manufacturers included E. Remington and Sons , IBM , Godrej , Imperial Typewriter Company , Oliver Typewriter Company , Olivetti , Royal Typewriter Company , Smith Corona , Underwood Typewriter Company , Facit , Adler , and Olympia-Werke . After the market had matured under the market dominance of large companies from Britain, Europe and

7700-425: The other elite , for twelve. This differed from the use of these terms in printing, where pica is a linear unit (approximately 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch) used for any measurement, the most common one being the height of a typeface. Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and running the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed switching between colors, which

7810-684: The other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models further reduced the number of keys and typebars by making each key perform three functions – each typebar could type three different characters. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists. Such three-row machines were popular with WWI journalists because they were lighter and more compact than four-bank typewriters, while they could type just as fast and use just as many symbols. Such three-row machines, such as

7920-403: The page. Harvard Mark I The Harvard Mark I , or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator ( ASCC ), was one of the earliest general-purpose electromechanical computers used in the war effort during the last part of World War II . One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initiated on 29 March 1944 by John von Neumann . At that time, von Neumann was working on

8030-422: The part at the upper left, the mating part had a threaded mounting for adjusting cam clearance from the power roll. The irregular "roundish" part, lower right center, was the cam itself. It rotated in the frame while in contact with the power roll. The surface of the cam in contact with the power roll had grooves for better grip. As the radius at the contact patch increased, the frame rotated clockwise to pull down on

8140-400: The platen advance mechanism at the left of the carriage. For a return, the tape wound up on a small reel operated from the drive system through a clutch. A cam engaged the clutch; it was disengaged by the left margin stop, perhaps directly, perhaps via another cam. A light-torque spring kept the return tape wound on the reel. The basic mechanism looked just like an IBM electric typewriter from

8250-440: The print. Spacing codes were stored in relays inside the machine as a line of text progressed. At least some Justowriters used carbon (as opposed to ink-impregnated fabric) ribbons to produce cleaner type, suitable for mass photo-set reproduction, sometimes referred to as cold type composition. The Line Casting Control or LCC product generated paper tapes for Linotype and Intertype automatic typesetters. In addition to punching

8360-557: The program onto paper tape. The tapes could then be loaded into computers to run the programs. Computers could then use their own punches to make paper tapes that could be used by the Flexowriters to print output. Among the computers which commonly used Flexowriters for this task was the DEC PDP-1 . The ability to support diverse encodings meant that adapting Flexowriters to generate the paper tapes used to drive CNC machine tool equipment

8470-413: The punched-card machine operation computed values to six decimal places, whereas the Mark I computed values to eighteen decimal places . Additionally, Mark I integrated the partial differential equation at a much smaller interval size [or smaller mesh] and so...achieved far greater precision . "Von Neumann joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, working on the immense number of calculations needed to build

8580-477: The results automatically in a useful document. As a cutting edge device of their time, Flexowriters, especially some of the specialized types like typesetters, were quite costly. They were made for extreme durability. There were porous sintered bronze bearings, many hardened steel parts, very strong springs, and a substantial AC motor to move all the parts. Most parts are made of heavy gauge steel. The housing and most removable covers were heavy die castings . While

8690-475: The ribbon being struck at all. This enabled the keys to hit the paper unobstructed, and was used for cutting stencils for stencil duplicators (aka mimeograph machines). The first typewriter to have the sliding type bars (laid out horizontally like a fan) that enable a typewriter to be "noiseless" was the American made Rapid which appeared briefly on the market in 1890. The Rapid also had the remarkable ability for

8800-531: The square housing in the photo of the auxiliary reader. The right side of a Flexowriter had a large (~1") connector for hooking the unit up to computers and other equipment. Depending on the model, this connector might be wired in many different ways. At various times and in various configurations, "Flexos" came with 5-, 6-, 7-, or 8-channel paper tape reader/punches, could have several auxiliary paper tape units attached, and could also attach to IBM punched card equipment. Electric typewriter A typewriter

8910-420: The timing on the relays. Another reader has also found that the timing settings of the various leaf switches (such as in the tape reader) are also important. The screws used in the Flexowriter were unique, having large flat heads with a very narrow screwdriver slot and a unique thread size and pitch. This may have been a conscious decision . Another reader found that standard 4-40UNC threads appear to fit some of

9020-403: The type bar reaches the end of its travel simply by striking the ribbon and paper. The Noiseless, developed by Kidder, has a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the type bar mechanically before pressing it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to dampen the noise. Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for

9130-762: The typebars strike upwards, the typist could not see the characters as they were typed. The index typewriter came into the market in the early 1880s. The index typewriter uses a pointer or stylus to choose a letter from an index. The pointer is mechanically linked so that the letter chosen could then be printed, most often by the activation of a lever. The index typewriter was briefly popular in niche markets. Although they were slower than keyboard type machines, they were mechanically simpler and lighter. They were therefore marketed as being suitable for travellers and, because they could be produced more cheaply than keyboard machines, as budget machines for users who needed to produce small quantities of typed correspondence. For example,

9240-605: The typewriter business was spun off as Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM , which then spent $ 1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01. In 1931, an electric typewriter was introduced by Varityper Corporation. It was called the Varityper , because a narrow cylinder-like wheel could be replaced to change

9350-444: The typing of columns with numbers of different length ($ 1.00, $ 10.00, $ 100.00, etc.) Languages such as French, Spanish, and German required diacritics , special signs attached to or on top of the base letter: for example, a combination of the acute accent ´ plus e produced é ; ~ plus n produced ñ . In metal typesetting , ⟨é⟩ , ⟨ñ⟩ , and others were separate sorts . With mechanical typewriters,

9460-455: The typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at the far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. Typewriters for languages written right-to-left operate in

9570-457: The typist to have entire control of the carriage by manipulation of the keyboard alone. The two keys that achieve this are positioned at the top of the keyboard (seen in the detail image below). They are a "Lift" key that advances the paper, on the platen, to the next line and a "Return" key that causes the carriage to automatically swing back to the right, ready for one to type the new line. So an entire page could be typed without one's hands leaving

9680-410: The upper edge of the cam, as shown, was a little projection that engaged the release lever, which was at the lowest part of the image; this was an irregular shape. When a key was pressed down, it moved the release lever and unlatched the cam for that letter; the spring-loaded lever pressing on the pin rotated the cam until it engaged the power roll. As the cam continued to turn, increasing radius rotated

9790-405: The war. CCC also manufactured other complex mechanical devices for the war effort, including M1 carbines . In 1944, the pioneering Harvard Mark I computer was constructed, using an Electromatic for output. In 1950, Edwin O. Blodgett filed a patent application on behalf of Commercial Controls Corporation for a "tape controlled typewriter." This machine used a six-level punched paper tape , and

9900-400: Was a major redesign of the Flexowriter in the mid 1960s. The Model 2201 Programatic, introduced in 1965, had a sleek modern styling and 13 programmable function keys . This was the first major change in appearance of Flexowriters in nearly forty years. Programming was done using a 320-contact plugboard , and all of the logic was implemented using relays . The case, although modern looking,

10010-441: Was a relatively simple affair, and many Flexowriters found homes in machine shops into the 1970s, when magnetic media displaced paper tape in the industry. Friden manufactured equipment which could connect their calculators to Flexowriters, printing output and performing unit record tasks such as form letters for bills, and eventually manufactured their own computers to further enhance these capabilities. These variants were sold as

10120-591: Was all-electronic, replacing the remaining mechanical components with magnetic core memory . The Mark II and Mark III were delivered to the US Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia . The Mark IV was built for the US Air Force , but it stayed at Harvard. The Mark I was disassembled in 1959, and portions of it went on display in the Science Center , as part of the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments . It

10230-471: Was annoyed that the cost ($ 50,000 or more according to Grace Hopper ) was not used to build additional computer equipment. The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each 23 decimal digits long. It could do 3 additions or subtractions in a second. A multiplication took 6 seconds, a division took 15.3 seconds, and a logarithm or a trigonometric function took over one minute. The Mark I read its instructions from

10340-407: Was developed for the printing industry. It allowed typists to produce justified text for use in typesetting. This worked by having the user type the document on a Recording unit, which placed extra codes for spacing on the paper tape. The tape was placed into a second specially adapted Flexowriter which had two paper tape reading heads; one would read the text while the other controlled the spacing of

10450-458: Was enraged, and only reluctantly attended the dedication ceremony on August 7, 1944. Aiken, in turn, decided to build further machines without IBM's help, and the ASCC came to be generally known as the "Harvard Mark I". IBM went on to build its Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) to both test new technology and provide more publicity for the company's efforts. The Mark I was followed by

10560-443: Was entirely metal, giving the machine a shipping weight of 132 pounds (60 kg). The selling price was £2900 (British pounds). Although primarily sold as a stand-alone word processor (a term not yet in use at the time), Friden also sold it with a communications option allowing it to be used as a computer terminal. Members of the 2200 family operated at 135 words per minute (11.3 characters per second). The family also included

10670-443: Was incremental, developed by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the automobile , the telephone, and telegraph , several people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in ever more commercially successful instruments. Historians have estimated that some form of the typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers and tinkerers tried to come up with

10780-561: Was merged with a closed-loop form-letter and printed on continuous-form letterhead; both tapes contained embedded " control characters " to switch between readers. As the unit record equipment (tabulating machine) industry matured and became the computer industry, Flexowriters were commonly used as console terminals for computers. Because ASCII character coding had not yet been standardized, each type of computer tended to use its own system for encoding characters; Flexowriters were capable of being configured with numerous encodings particular to

10890-526: Was patented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes , Frank Haven Hall , Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use or even recommend it. The working prototype was made by clock-maker and machinist Matthias Schwalbach. Hall, Glidden and Soule sold their shares in the patent (US 79,265) to Densmore and Sholes, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as

11000-486: Was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company , of Stamford, Connecticut , in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer typewriters, it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual typebars. The machine was produced in several variants but apparently not a commercial success, having come to market ahead of its time, before ubiquitous electrification . The next step in the development of

11110-465: Was produced until 1934. Considered one of the very best of the index typewriters, part of the Mignon's popularity was that it featured interchangeable indexes as well as type , fonts and character sets . This is something very few keyboard machines were capable of--and only at considerable added cost. Although they were pushed out of the market in most of the world by keyboard machines, successful Japanese and Chinese typewriters typewriters are of

11220-410: Was produced with only upper-case characters. The Writing Ball was a template for inventor Frank Haven Hall to create a derivative that would produce letter prints cheaper and faster. Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to

11330-462: Was replaced in 1964 while ill. It is unclear what effect this had on development, especially as Blodgett was apparently biased against electronics, favoring electromechanical solutions to design problems. Friden was acquired by the Singer Corporation in 1965. Singer had little or no understanding of the computer industry, and there was a clash of corporate culture with Friden employees. There

11440-605: Was shown a demonstration set that Charles Babbage ’s son had given to Harvard University 70 years earlier. This led him to study Babbage and to add references to the Analytical Engine to his proposal; the resulting machine "brought Babbage’s principles of the Analytical Engine almost to full realization, while adding important new features." The ASCC was developed and built by IBM at their Endicott plant and shipped to Harvard in February 1944. It began computations for

11550-407: Was that these letters appeared to have been individually typed by hand. These were complemented by autopen machines which could use a pen to place a signature on letters making them appear to have been hand-signed. Auxiliary paper-tape readers could be attached to a Flexowriter to create an early form of " mail merge ", where a long custom-created tape containing individual addresses and salutations

11660-437: Was the basis for the machines CCC and Friden built over the next 15 years. This improved machine was contemporaneous with the first generation of commercial computers. Applications for Flexowriters exploded in the 1950s, covering territory in commercial printing, machine tools, computers, and many forms of office automation. This versatility was helped by Friden's willingness to engineer and build many different configurations. In

11770-413: Was the first to turn IBM "punched-card equipment to scientific use: computation of astronomical tables by the method of finite differences, as envisioned by Babbage 100 years earlier for his Difference Engine". Very soon after, IBM started to modify its tabulators to facilitate this kind of computation. One of these tabulators, built in 1931, was The Columbia Difference Tabulator. John von Neumann had

11880-402: Was typed. What was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the typebars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters" which used frontstriking, in which the typebars struck forward against

11990-451: Was unidirectional. This meant that complex programs had to be physically lengthy. A program loop was accomplished by loop unrolling or by joining the end of the paper tape containing the program back to the beginning of the tape (literally creating a loop ). At first, conditional branching in Mark I was performed manually. Later modifications in 1946 introduced automatic program branching (by subroutine call). The first programmers of

12100-404: Was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts were highlighted in red. The red color was also used on some selected characters in running text, for emphasis. When a typewriter had this facility, it could still be fitted with a solid black ribbon; the lever was then used to switch to fresh ribbon when the first stripe ran out of ink. Some typewriters also had a third position which stopped

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