File names are "Cool" and "Cool2". Yup, definitely stuff from high school.

@GalbreathSQuin

4 жыл бұрын

I have a word processor a recently bought, and some of it's files are named "oh yeah, fuck, sex, i love tom, babyyyyy, bitch", etc. Definately a used to belong to a highschooler!

@julianmorrisco

3 жыл бұрын

Vigorous pumping! Indeed. I did a typing course more than 20 years ago and we had these miracles of modern technology. Of course, there were some IBM selectrix (or whatever they were called) but they were for exams and finishing students. These Smith Coronas were cheap and cheerful and the mainstay of the school. Although WordPerfect and MS word (DOS) were around, these things hit a sweet spot of space, cost, noise (no computer fans) and edit ability. I still appreciate the workflow - work as if you are on a typewriter, but you can edit and fix typos! Nowadays I just vomit whatever is in my head and edit later, just like everyone else. This works fine, but there is some value in the discipline of having to collect my thoughts before starting to write. I managed to get above 95 wpm using one of these, and although I highly doubt I’m anywhere near that today, I never regret having had formal typing lessons.

@VarunGupta3009

3 жыл бұрын

You mean High sCOOL?

@NoorquackerInd

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah sure, I'm in high school and my Google Drive is all "bruh" "bruh2" "agh" "aaaaaaaa" "cringe" "turbo cringe" "frick"

@njdotson

3 жыл бұрын

@@NoorquackerInd unnamed document But when on my own pc I name stuff "thing" "cringe" "I won't finish this" "wacky image" "why am I like this"

Every time I hear that "ding" from a typewriter, I'm reminded of being a little kid in the late 80's and early 90's, when computers hadn't been spread far and wide yet. I'd have to type up papers and would go to my local library where they had a long table with several typewriters on it. People would just sit there and type up their papers all day long. I had to have a librarian teach me to use one; she was surprised I never had. After I got my first computer, I remember going into the library one day and being surprised that all the typewriters were gone. They were replaced by computers. Except now, instead of young kids (who couldn't afford computers, trying to type up school reports), it was all old people trying to learn how to use a computer. The same librarian who taught kids how to use typewriters for the first time, was now teaching the elderly to send emails.

@asnowballinhell

3 жыл бұрын

I'd forgotten about library typewriters. How could I forget? IIRC, you had to pay to use the typewriters, 25 cents for set amount of minutes.

@chen5chs

3 жыл бұрын

@@asnowballinhell this is why typing fast is good

@miguelcarmona3036

3 жыл бұрын

Okay this was like super cute wtf. Idk It put a smile on my face

@drunkgaming3064

2 жыл бұрын

Nice story! It reminded me I was thought in school but it was so weird because we also already had computers. My class was like an introduction though, there were women majoring in being a secretary typists and had more lessons.

@glennso47

2 жыл бұрын

When I hear the “ding “ from the typewriter, I,m reminded of the song by The Boston Pops Orchestra called “The Typewriter.”

When he wrote "If I start typei word qords words!!" that really hit me

@twongi6044

3 жыл бұрын

spoken like a true genius

@addammadd

3 жыл бұрын

Why isn’t this a t shirt?

I had something similar to this when I was getting my masters degree, and its practically impossible to understand how wonderful it was to have a way to create a document and then have it typed out. Prior to that I spent more time manually typing, correcting, use white-out and correction tape, then I did doing the paper. And still my papers were a mess. So the speed of this was not an issue at all because it was a huge time and labor savings!

@stephengnb

2 жыл бұрын

It must have been a very satisfying sound when you were done writing a paper, then hit print and listened to it rapidly type out your paper that you know doesn't need edits.

@C_Floor

2 жыл бұрын

Stewart Grifin

@ohsoloco5113

10 ай бұрын

I had one similar that got me through college in the 90's. I couldn't afford a computer, and I despised going to a computer lab on campus.

500 years from now, some archaeologist is going to cry in delight at finding a copy of Microsoft Works, only to weep in anguish as he realizes some kid with NO idea of its future historical value wrote over it with his school papers, like an artist who scraped the surface off of Shakespeare's first play for some spare sketching material. But hey, at least he has a plot summary for _Twelve Angry Men._

@TorreFernand

5 жыл бұрын

There's a lot of debate in the TV and radio industry over tapes that were recorded over because "We don't need this episode anymore, might as well give some use to the tape. It's not like anyone will watch it in a few decades, right?"

@brickman409

5 жыл бұрын

Fernando Torre Yeah I think there's some episodes of Dr who that are lost forever

@AnonymousGentooman

5 жыл бұрын

To be fair, a floppy disk wouldnt survive those 500 years

@xaenon

5 жыл бұрын

@@TorreFernand Yup. Virtually all of material from the old Dumont TV network was dumped New York's East River.

@xaenon

5 жыл бұрын

@@AnonymousGentooman I'm honestly surprised it works today.

"That's why it's called the 'Shift' key, because it shifts the carriage down." My mind is blown. One of those things you never question the origin of, but when someone tells you, your face becomes a meme.

@spicyweasel

4 жыл бұрын

I think the arrow on the shift key shows that the characters above on the key are activated.

@squatchhammer7215

4 жыл бұрын

Typewriters either shifted the platten (the roller where the type strikes against) or the Corona basket shift.

@therealvbw

4 жыл бұрын

BBBBUT THE CARRIAGE MOVES UP! I own a typewriter.. This explains the up arrow coincidentally

@dhpbear2

4 жыл бұрын

@@therealvbw Back in the days of typesetting, 'Uppercase' referred the the typefaces in the upper half of the printer's type case!

@muppetpaster

4 жыл бұрын

Same as upper/lower case.........

Interesting note about the printing speed of the typewriter, which you called a bit slow: If you look at around 9:20 , the typewriter has to reset to each line to type left-to-right. IBM Wheelwriters of around the same period (which also supported floppy disk external storage) printed documents from memory in boustrophedon - that is, the first line was left-to-right, then the second line was right-to-left, then the third was left-to-right and so on. This saved time as the typewriter did not have to reset the carriage all the way to the left each line. Over a long letter I'm sure this would add up to quite some time savings even if the per-character typing speed was the same as this Smith Corona.

@ecamville2928

Жыл бұрын

That's really clever!

Omg, I would LOVE to have something so simplified. Just typing and printing. No ads, no unnecessary software, and other then the ribbons and corrective tap, no mess! It does exactly what you want. It’s why I had a typewriter, but if I had one that took key drives instead of floppy disks, I’d be set!

I had one of these! I worked as a secretary for a Private Investigator, typing up reports and bills on this typewriter. I got good at lining up the text because it would tell me how many characters were left. Minimised mistakes as well! ETA: The sounds, oh my the nostalgia!

@PanAndScanBuddy

3 жыл бұрын

I'm sorry but it's funny to hear "I was a secretary for a private investigator" and have you waxing nostalgic about the typewriter. Like, I know we're all here for cool typewriter facts so I am not passing any judgement when I say this, but it's funny lol

This video is just pretty chill. I've had this thing in my collection for years and wanted to show it to you. There's not much of a point here, but I hope you find it interesting. There _will_ be a point, though, for next week!

@quinius173

6 жыл бұрын

Great video!

@mystica-subs

6 жыл бұрын

I had a simpler Smith Corona word processor since the early 90s or late 80s.. 2 line LCD display maybe 60 chars wide maybe less... I wrote a lot of school assignments in my life on it and it was tedious as hell to write multiple pages into 2 lines. But it worked! It's so cool seeing this more featureful version. Thanks!

@Dallen9

6 жыл бұрын

What would have been cool/funny is if you showed of the MS Word version of one of these typewriters.

@kelli217

6 жыл бұрын

I am not sure what you mean by "showed off the MS Word version". Can you elaborate?

@JasonHalversonjaydog

6 жыл бұрын

i owned one of those, except mine was a Brother brand. had it back around the mid-late 90's i think it was. the "word eraser" wasnt' exclusive to smith corona, my Brother had that too, just a slightly different name. had a word eraser and a line eraser where you could delete the whole line with one button

Aside from it being very slow in some areas, I love these kinds of devices. Something that puts mechanical processes into an electronic device fascinates me.

@thegardenofeatin5965

Жыл бұрын

I have this concept in my head I keep trying to find an outlet for. Modern computers, which are millions of times faster than this old Smith-Corona, are used for largely the same tasks as this. People use computers for very manual tasks with just the barest hint of automation, like spell check and whatnot. Word processing hasn't really improved much in the last 20 years, despite Word bloating like a pregnant sow.

@blakksheep736

3 ай бұрын

​@@thegardenofeatin5965 I beg to differ. Different fonts, font sizes, font colours, highlighter colors, page colours, bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, headers, footers, landscape, page sizes, tables, spreadsheets and forever on. Heck, if you told someone at the time of this device a day will come where you can put _videos_ in a text document, they wouldn't believe it, but here we are.

I had one of these in the early 90s. Ironically, years later I was in a stationary store to buy a replacement ribbon for it and while waiting in line, saw a copy of Tomb Raider 2 in the remainder bin, bought it, installed it on my computer that I'd bought in the meantime and fell in love with video games and started writing by doing Tomb Raider fan fiction on the SC 3200, then started writing original fiction....20 years and a dozen novels later, I can say that it all started on/ because of this machine.

@dexterramey8787

11 ай бұрын

What novels you writep?

I have a real soft spot for machines like this - not quite a full computer, but not quite a "dumb" device either. Great video, keep up the good work.

@matthewghali2987

6 жыл бұрын

Matthew Harrison (matthehat) if it had a serial port to hook a modem, it would have been perfect to hit the BBSes back then!

@Chriva

4 жыл бұрын

Funnily enough, many of them actually had some horsepower. It was just a matter of dumbing the software down and remove any means of video output.

16:00 The @-key was used in billing to show pricing for items, for example: 6 eggs @ $0.15 = $0.75

@DigitalRX2r

5 жыл бұрын

6 @ $0.15 would be $0.90 though.

@brendancarlson1678

4 жыл бұрын

Meatbag gives a volume discount.

@GraveUypo

4 жыл бұрын

@ is the symbol for weight we use for cows in brazil. one @ = 15kg

@ian_b

4 жыл бұрын

@@GraveUypo Your cows only weigh 15kg? Why do you have such tiny cows?

@ian_b

4 жыл бұрын

@@GraveUypo I just loved the image of all these tiny 1@ cows running around :)

The wife and I got through our undergrads at Memphis State in the 90's with this machine. It was awful. But I recall you could play a very bad version of Tetris on it.

@benny_lemon5123

3 жыл бұрын

No matter how clunky, horrid, disappointing the information processing tech human kind ever creates, we always at some point find a way to milk even just a drop of novelty from it. Lol.

@Patrick94GSR

3 жыл бұрын

hey fellow Memphian over here! I just drove through midtown and East Memphis this morning, actually.

@rutgerb

3 жыл бұрын

Sounds like a LGR thing

@ttun100

2 жыл бұрын

I had one, it was cheaper than a computer and printer and I wrote many college papers and resumes on it.

@arfansthename

2 жыл бұрын

does it use wasd or arrow keys?

love how this is unscripted because of how most of it is based on his personal experience, and not only that, he presented it so well

My grandmother had one of these computer typewriters. Probably not this specific brand, though. One day in grade school I had to write a paper for school and type it. I was at my grandmothers and asked her to use one of these machines to do it. I typed the whole thing out chicken peck style. Once I was done, like an hour later... we couldn't figure out how to get the stupid thing to print. Frustrated my grandmother just walked over to her traditional typewriter she had in the office and typed the thing out in 5 minutes. She said she knew I did it so she didn't mind.

@CableFlame

4 жыл бұрын

My grandmother had a much earlier model from the same company: a PWP-80. I'll never forget that thing, nor the sound it made when it booted up.

@AmberAmber

4 жыл бұрын

Awww Sweet gramas both XO

Holy crap! My family had one of those. It was the only computer in the house till my brother and I fished an IBM AT and IBM XT out of the dumpster of a nearby business park. They were covered in food waste, but still worked. Although smelled like baked beans when turned on.

@willythemailboy2

6 жыл бұрын

My family had several. I spent a lot of hours on these things.

@richfiles

6 жыл бұрын

No one will ever need more than 640 Kilobeans of odor emanating from their PC.

@nelsonbrum8496

4 жыл бұрын

🤣

@magusperde365

Жыл бұрын

The AT and XT keyboards are probably worth more now than anything else

AHA! A fellow They Might Be Giants fan! I saw two file names, “Palindrome” and “Birdhouse” and wondered, but when you opened Palindrome, it had the lyrics to I Palindrome I!

@bordershader

2 жыл бұрын

When I think about it, it makes perfect sense he'd be a TMBG fan. 👍👏👏

Years ago, I worked at a store that sold these things. I sold a personal word processor to George Carlin. I can't remember the brand or model, but it had a cathode ray tube (CRT) display. This was the early days of computers and some people preferred a dedicated machine because of various reasons, including a lack of interest in learning to use a computer. Another reason was to simplify things. Everything was designed to work together, instead of trying to get the software to work with the computer, or the printer to work with the computer, etc.

@JrIcify

Жыл бұрын

Even though I love custom PCs and open software, part of me would love for this mentality to come back.

@Dave-dh7rt

Жыл бұрын

George carlin was the goat!! Rest in peace!

The shelves in the background are so much more beautiful than the greenscreen. I really like it!

@Elesario

6 жыл бұрын

IKEA at its finest :D

@meeder78

6 жыл бұрын

Agreed!

@zivizivi2328

6 жыл бұрын

meh too busy and distracting. just like under my desk

9:27 I find it hilarious that it "Angrily" types 12 angry men just because it's underlined

@deusexaethera

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, no. It's typing the underline separately, because otherwise it would need a separate set of typefaces for underlined vs. non-underlined characters.

@HimanXK

3 жыл бұрын

@@deusexaethera right, which makes it come across as angry because it's slowed down and hitting the paper twice per letter

@deusexaethera

3 жыл бұрын

@Alice Eliot: I certainly hope that isn't a complaint about me being un-entertaining, because you're posting on a video about vintage office equipment. I'm fun at the kinds of parties I get invited to, because I know things and I don't always say exactly what is expected of me.

@_ikako_

3 жыл бұрын

@@deusexaethera do you also correct people when they tell a joke that isn't scientifically accurate?

@Milamberinx

3 жыл бұрын

@@_ikako_ what Shawn said wasn't even a correction (even though he started "Yeah, no") he just restated Fernando's comment in a terribly boring way. If he'd managed to impart any information that's not bleeding obvious maybe he'd get invited to more parties.

That corona in the title pushed this back into my recommended, hell yeah

When reviewing items like these, please keep in mind their era and technology level of that era. I had a similar machine and it seemed like magic. I was able to create an entire training program for a restaurant chain on that machine and output the manuscript by myself. No mean feat for the time.

@RRaquello

2 жыл бұрын

People may laugh at this, but I remember the first time I saw an electronic calculator. It was a Bowmar Brain, and they had them set up in the TV section of Korvettes, a now defunct department store. You were allowed to try out the display models, and we kids thought they were an absolute miracle. We'd stand there for a half hour just punching in and adding and subtracting and dividing numbers, wishing we had one to do our homework with. They cost about a hundred dollars (a hundred 1973 dollars, that is), so were way beyond even wishing for. The dawn of the computer age!

@wayneyoung8647

2 жыл бұрын

@@RRaquello I remember the Texas Instruments calculator my father bought in 1976 for his contracting business. It was rechargeable and had a case to carry it in. I was allowed to check my homework with it. Great stuff!

@RRaquello

2 жыл бұрын

@@wayneyoung8647 My brother got a Texas Instruments calculator for his birthday one year, and we all considered it an outrageously expensive present (this was around 1977 or 78), but our parents justified it because he was an accounting student and needed it for school. What we actually did most with it was stuff like figuring out batting averages. The TI calculator also did mathematical and scientific formulas, so it was more advanced than the Bowmar Brain. We spent hours with that calculator and the Baseball Encyclopedia just making up our own categories of statistics and percentages and figuring them on the calculator. I guess an early version of Moneyball.

@blakksheep736

3 ай бұрын

​@@RRaquello and now calculators cost nothing. Sometimes less than nothing. And not in all that long, too. It's great.

This makes me feel really old. I remember the huge step forward of graduating from a manual typewriter to an electric, and then to typing Nirvana: an IBM Selectric with (gasp) built-in correction capabilities. Exotica like this PWP-3200 weren't even imaginable. Horribly slow, clumsy, noisy? Yup, but that depends on where you were sitting at the time. Great video. Wish I'd had one then but glad I don't have one now.

@PhthaloType

3 жыл бұрын

What makes me feel old was he graduated high school in 2012.

@PanAndScanBuddy

3 жыл бұрын

Imagine typing KZread comments on a typewriter! That would be dope. Really feel the weight of the words.

@russlehman2070

3 жыл бұрын

Having gone through college typing term papers on a manual typewriter, I can appreciate what a step up even this was. Though it is tediously slow and clunky compared to a modern (or even 1990) PC with word processing software and a decent printer, just the fact that you have some editing capability gives it a huge advantage over any regular typewriter, even an IBM Selectric. With a typewriter, editing usually consists of throwing a way one or more pages and starting over. OTOH, that daisy wheel print head looks like it would break if you sneezed at it.

@dwightl5863

3 жыл бұрын

@@russlehman2070 To be honest those daisy wheels very durable.

You used this in high school because you were a retro nerd. I used this in high school because it's what we had! 😜 Also: keep the jacket. I dig it!

@tanya5322

4 жыл бұрын

AirborneSurfer I had a similar electronic typewriter in college, but it did not have any removable memory option. And those small floppies that looked like a slice of American cheese were still somewhat new

We got a word processor like this for Christmas in 94...I was enthralled. We never had a type writer in the house and I'd never used a computer at that point. I wrote prolifically as a kid but all by hand - having a machine to save, edit and print my work was a dream! I think I still have a folder of stories I wrote and printed somewhere...

I'm going through the Technology Connections back catalogue and I felt the need to whistle the tune of some "strikingly smooth jazz" at the end.

The jacket is back because "because". You show them haters, TC. :D

@megabojan1993

6 жыл бұрын

Fuck the haters. That's what I always say :)

@call_me_stan5887

6 жыл бұрын

i.imgur.com/mPBa8K3.png

@youreperfectstudio7931

6 жыл бұрын

The jacket is sexy!

@zombiegeek33

6 жыл бұрын

i think he is cute with or without the jacket

@youreperfectstudio7931

6 жыл бұрын

Well Naomi Campbell is still sexy naked but is even more sexy with Victoria's Secret underwear on. I think its kind of the same thing but with a jacket in this case.

It felt so weird when I first discovered that a "word processor" used to be a physical machine instead of just a piece of software. Most people probably assume we jumped straight from typewriters to terminals.

@fun_ghoul

4 жыл бұрын

Terminals is a funny word to use there. Made me think of the Bell Canada "Alex" thing my uncle used to have back in the day, ostensibly for stock ticker info but...there were also chat rooms and he was a single twentysomething in Montreal. Anyway, the device was weird. Thanks for the flashback.

@Solitaire001

3 жыл бұрын

Before getting our first PC at work we had a CPT Word Processor. It used 7" floppy disks that could hold 100 documents, and had a printwheel printer that was so loud that it was put in a sound-dampening enclosure. Due to low amount of memory it had you could do copy and paste or justified printing, but you had to reload the OS to change from one to the other.

Had one of these in college for my 1st year in college, it was cheaper than a computer. It had the uncanny ability to lose your "word processing" documents if you lose power and didn't save it. Finally straw was when I lost a 25 page paper on it because I forgot to save and we briefly lost power. Also, it was slow, like you pointed out. I bought a computer the next week.

If you couldn't afford a computer nor access it in university years ago, I bet this thing would have been a godsend back then

@tut2tut2

10 ай бұрын

You're right, it was!

Can you please upload a second video where you let the typeriter print an 10 Page document? I could watch the printprocess forever.

@MrOliverock

6 жыл бұрын

He should do a 10 hours of video.

@DarthVader1977

5 жыл бұрын

let the typewriter* print a* 10 page document

@DarthVader1977

5 жыл бұрын

@@MrOliverock He should *do* *10* *hours* *of* *video.*

@asailijhijr

5 жыл бұрын

@@DarthVader1977 too many asterisks *bolds* the text.

@dj33036

5 жыл бұрын

I agree, there's something really fascinating about the way they work and the sound they make.

I like the jacket. It gives you an air of professionalism without conceit.

@fun_ghoul

4 жыл бұрын

I'd say it's more of an air of "You'll need a jacket to enter the dining room, sir."

We had two of these in our family, from Olivetti. I wrote my masters thesis on it in 1999. I was happy with it, although while printing the thesis the printing cylinder became too hot, did not grab the paper anymore and came off somehow. I fixed it with Loctite and reduced the number of pages I printed to avoid too much heat. It was the last time I used the machine.

I owned one, it got me through the first couple years of college! Loved it.

When I was in college there was someone in one of my classes who had one of these, and this was in 1998, so it was pretty outdated by that point. Also they were trying to print something during class and the professor was not very pleased.

@digitalfootballer9032

5 жыл бұрын

I was still using mine in 2000 when I was a senior in college. My housemates mocked it ruthlessly, lol. So I would punish them by printing up my reports bright and early in the morning! And as you know, it sounded like a jackhammer.

@cat.professor.

5 жыл бұрын

I would always end up printing my papers at 3 am and my roommates hated it for me. I sometimes would put a pillow over it to try to muffle up the sounds. Ha ha. @@digitalfootballer9032

@marcusdamberger

4 жыл бұрын

@@digitalfootballer9032 Serves them right! You should have printed up at 3am like @Cathleen Daniel did!

This wasn't slow it was an amazing thing to own. By today's standards it's awful but back then it was epic

@BertGrink

6 жыл бұрын

I agree; i bet anyone who owned one of these would be the envy of their peers, back then.

@RacerX-

6 жыл бұрын

It was epic if you didn't have a computer. I remember messing with these in the store and used to wonder how the heck people used these they are so slow. I had a C64 and an Amiga at the time and later a Macintosh so compared to these it was hard to use a WP like this. If you did have a computer it was 1000 times better speed, even the C64.

@rimmersbryggeri

6 жыл бұрын

Its no slower than an Apple Laser Writer. They were fucking shit toock up way more room and were less reliable than this like all early laser printers were. The other drawback was that a computer with a printer cost more than a car and the screen of a contemporary macintosh was no bigger and black and white. At least any macintosh anybody would have at home. Ibm compatibles were still very expensive to . Just a hard drive would cost more than this whole machine.

@RacerX-

6 жыл бұрын

+tarstarkusz. Yeah I know what you mean. 40 columns was sometimes a pain. But with the right software it wasn't so bad. I did have (and still do) the RAM expander, and with GEOS it was great. As for the Amiga it was a no brainer. There was plenty of software in my neck of the woods in California. In my small area, hardly a metropolis, there was no less then 6 places that sold Amiga and software. I never bought software from mail order, and never had a problem finding anything I needed. In fact in the early 1990s the A500 was easy to get in a bundle for about $200 with a tv adapter, word processor, games, and RAM expansion. Of course by 1992 it was a bit out dated but still a much better experience then the likes of this WPS. I am not sure why people say that software was hard to find in the USA because it certainly was not my experience. Plenty of software and hardware to choose from. If you look at the manufacturers of add ons and software for the Amiga most of them where from the USA. All you have to do is browse an old issue of Amiga World or Compute! of the time to see what I mean.

@TalesOfWar

6 жыл бұрын

I had one of these. THey were a joy to use before computers were more common and reasonably priced. Oh, and when printers stopped sucking (quality wise, they still suck in terms of usability and software lol).

These were awesome...I used to type up dumb spec scripts as a kid and print them out on these...THE PRINTING IS FUN TO WATCH! 😊

"Corona" So relevant

@Hansengineering

4 жыл бұрын

delete this

@Pidalin

4 жыл бұрын

I wanted write that when I saw that, I didn't expect someone noticed that before. :-D

@josephnevin

4 жыл бұрын

@@Hansengineering wish I could but I'm all out of correction tape 😅😅

@justuni8735

4 жыл бұрын

i wonder why we got this recommendation......

@MrGollum1996

3 жыл бұрын

Hol up

Around 1983 I left the old noisy and nerve wrecking Olivetti Typewriter with the rotating ball head and worked on what looked like an IBM compatible, it was an Olivetti wordprocessor with monocrome CRT and wordprocessor dedicated keyboard. One thing I miss was the incredibly intelligent and soft feel of the screen scroll. Unfortunately a few years later I did my military service and had to work on a honeywell bull card perforating machine, the printer was an estreemly fast and noisy parallel head 132 column printer. Practical a drum across the sheet had all the letters and numbers for each of the 132 positions. The drum would roll at a high speed and 132 hammers would hit on the right (or write) time. The same noise 132 manual typewriters would make working together in a small room

@tanya5322

4 жыл бұрын

saintpine I can remember taking an intro to computers summer school course ... probably in the very late 1970s, or maybe early 1980s. The class had an Olivetti ... I’m not sure if it was an actual PC or a terminal. I don’t remember much about the printer it was paired with, but I do remember that the keyboard had a much nicer ‘feel’ to it, in my opinion of course. It’s a tactical response that still look for in keyboards today.

My grandmother had one of these in the early 90's. I remember playing with it a little bit. When my grandparents were living in England for a few years we received many letters typed on that machine. It seemed very professional at the time and the print quality for text was much better than a dot matrix printer.

I remember my mum using a word processor for work and my sister getting one when she was at college as we didn't have a computer. Great video it brought back some memories

2 years ago: huh this is cool Now: haha "corona" Me: no.... stop...

@deusexaethera

3 жыл бұрын

The coincidence really isn't that funny, I don't get why people keep saying it. Are people searching KZread for any instance of the word "corona" just to make coronavirus-related comments on them?

@rydoggo

3 жыл бұрын

@@deusexaethera it really isn't funny. I'm saying people need to stop.

@deusexaethera

3 жыл бұрын

@@rydoggo: Oh, gotcha. Amazing how easy it is to misinterpret things. I thought you were telling the eerie coincidence to "stop".

@locke103

3 жыл бұрын

@@rydoggo it gets old. my hometown is also named corona, a melting pot within new york. super mario rpg, a few enemies had a spell named corona. seriously, people can screw off with... whatever this even is. i'd be hard pressed to even call this basic human stupidity.

@ashkitt7719

3 жыл бұрын

This typewriter killed gramgram

My wife had one of these in the early 90s. It only had a 3-line display and no media drive, but it was fantastic for things like job application forms where you had to fill in your personal statement in a large box. All you had to do was photocopy the form a few times to give you some practice sheets, and you could use trial and error to work up a typed statement that fitted *exactly* into the box.

@joeltunnah

4 жыл бұрын

dunebasher1971, funny that we fill all forms now by hand pretty much. But yes I remember filling forms out with a typewriter in the 80’s. I suppose now you could scan it in, convert to PDF, and then edit it directly.

In 1992, I was a freshman in High School, and we took "Keyboarding" class on a Word processor / Typewriter hybrid. It wasn't the machine in your video. What we had was a much simpler machine. It actually had a normal daisy wheel (not a daisy wheel printer) and it did not have a disc drive. I believe the screen was only 2 or 3 lines tall, and you could only type one line at a time. Once you hit enter, it would print the whole line. The next year, we got a room full of computers and idk what happened to those word processors.

@MattMcIrvin

6 жыл бұрын

In the mid-1980s in my freshman year of college, I briefly used an IBM Wheelwriter that was even simpler: it didn't have an LCD, but it had enough RAM in it to store the last line or so of text, and it had a lift-off correction ribbon in addition to the regular ribbon. Those things together meant that even though you were typing directly to the paper, you could delete the last few words you were typing just by pressing a delete key--it would remember what characters to type to make the lift-off ribbon do its thing, much like this gadget here in "type mode". Like this Smith-Corona, it used a daisy wheel rather than a type ball. But it wasn't long before I got hold of a computer that could handle a usable word processor (an Atari ST) and never looked back. I'd already gotten used to using WordStar and WordPerfect on my dad's computer at home, so I wasn't going to stand for using typewriters for very long.

@olik136

6 жыл бұрын

Sad is, that I took a class 10 years later to learn how to type- and they would give us actual typewriters... in 2002..analog, mechanic typewriters... the class did cost money

@MrGoatflakes

6 жыл бұрын

Lol you couldn't pay me to do take that class +Oli K. Unless I was writing a novel or something. Actually no, even then, I'd rather just write it in Notepad++, Notepad has blown up on me too many times when I hit the (16k or is it 64k? can't memba). Is that still even a thing? Lol. Actually I'd even rather do a novel in Vi or something horrid like that rather than having the torture of typing on a typewriter or even worse writing it out long hand :x And yes I have even used Vi on a ancient piece of shit SunOS 4 or some crap. In a terminal. Over dial up. Hell, I've even done "word processing" on a "TRS-80 Color Computer II" "64kb" (yes I am quite sure they used to say KB or kb not kB and mean 1024 BYTES not bits) "home computer" with a "word processor" "cartridge". Without so much as disc, tape or even printer. So the document would vanish as soon as anyone else wanted to use the computer. What I would do was type in any notes I'd made earlier when I didn't have access to the computer or compose on the computer. Then edit it till I was happy with it or more likely someone else needed the computer. Then as we didn't have a printer or anyway to save work, I'd literally copy it out with a pen and paper. Only to have to type it all in again if it needed further "word processing". It was still faster than using my portable mechanical underwood typewriter, which I sucked at, although if I would have thought to use scissors and glue to "cut and paste" actual paper then perhaps the underwood would have won out, because it was the cutting and pasting not so much the typing that saved me real time and made it easier to write and organise my thoughts. Because as primitive as it was, 32x16 characters on a screen at a time and MUCH less than 64kb useful memory total for the text itself, not that I ever managed to get that big, that's like a good sized book chapter maybe, and was in grade school, you could do useful work by reorganising disjointed ideas and putting them into a coherent structure by actually "cut and paste"ing and I found it WAY easier to going about my writing that fluid way, Although I'd probably just had manually cuntpasted actually longhand and then copy it out neatly when I was done, that's how much I hated using the damn thing. It jammed a lot cause the arms were bent from me and my brothers abusing it from pressing multiple keys at once, before we knew this was bad. And I in any case found it near impossible to get the requisite speed with it to actually form thoughts and put them down onto paper with the mechanical portable underwood typewriter. Although I liked the idea of it, and occasionally I would even type manually the "final word processed draft" manually out by hand if I wanted it to look extra spiffy. Fuck what a hideous workflow. Although it was a revolution over writing into an exercise book of actual paper with a pen or pencil, as fucked as that sounds, it's true. Now we have workflows verging on the magical, and equally magical distractions to make sure you get even less done between arguing and pontificating on social media and watching cat videos and leveling your paladin and learning how to program and writing toy programs to make sure "know how to program" without actual ever writing anything particularly useful...

@johnfrancisdoe1563

6 жыл бұрын

Oli K Those fully mechanical typewriters teach touch-typing much better than computers with all their distractions. Except one major issue: They teach you to hit the keys harder, which increases the risk of RSI where using actual computers. Been there, got the bandages.

@tinnagigja3723

6 жыл бұрын

I lived in Iceland, so we had (probably) those same machines under some "teachy-sounding" Icelandic title, so I haven't been able to find them. A failure of my google-fu. Who made those things? What are they called? Keyboard trainers?

Wow this takes me back! I used an early variant of this machine I bought in 1989 to do my college course. As my first ever experience of owning a 'computer' at home it was really exciting. My version of this machine didn't even use a 3.25" drive, but used it's own proprietary disks with just 100K characters of storage per disk! (compared to a dreamy 512K characters of the later machine seen here with the standard 3.25" disk drive.) Yes it was slow, but as my very first experience of word processing at home, it was still thrilling to use. I remember printing off assignments taking forever and the noise of that daisy wheel printer echoing around the house. I also remember how expensive it was to run. The cartridge holding the typewriter tapes were forever running out as the plastic ribbon only had one pass under the daisy wheel. You could buy circulating fabric ribbons but the quality wasn't as good and soon started to fade. Add to this the expense of the correction tapes and the disks and this was not a cheap beast to run! The 100K disks came in packs of 2 for around £10 (about $13) Wow! Nevertheless, this machine served me well for three years before I upgraded to the legendary Amstrad PCW9512 in 1992. (You should make a video about that awesome machine! To give you some idea why machines like these had a market, when I upgraded again in 1993 to my first proper Windows PC with its 386SX processor and 40MB hard drive (yes MB not GB) it cost me around £1000!!! Unbelievable!

This showed up ony newsfeed due to the word Corona. Stayed for the great presentation!

This is basically Microsoft word: hardware edition

@Aragubas

4 жыл бұрын

that's why is soo slow

@ZaHandle

4 жыл бұрын

Microsoft Words the more reliable version

@HomeofLawboy

3 жыл бұрын

So like, Microhard Word right

@ChaseMC215

3 жыл бұрын

True

@liamsamples2965

3 жыл бұрын

@@HomeofLawboy Macrohard*

Back in the day this type of machine was popular in college classrooms that allowed them, even ones that didn't run on batteries (but God help you if someone tripped on you power cord). Both the word processing functions and the printer seemed more than fast enough back then because most people who used them had nothing faster to compare them to. When I first used the DOS version of Word Perfect on an IBM PC in the late 1980's I was astonished just how fast it was compared to what I had been accustomed to.

@AmberAmber

4 жыл бұрын

Same!!

I remember when we got one of these... Was learning English at the time, and was trying to type "what do you want to be when you grow up", as "waddaya" (beepbeep), "wadaya" (beepbeep), "wadaia" (beepbepp)!

My mother who is now 85 was in her prime as a secretary in the 70s and 80s. I remember she had her own manual typewriter, a hefty Remington thing which fascinated me as a child. At work she had a succession of increasingly sophisticated typewriters from manual to golf ball electric to word processor. And the pièce de resistance, a VT100 dumb terminal on connected presumably by some kind of serial data line to a DEC VAX VMS mainframe computer running word processing software. The print-out was collected from down the corridor in the printing room. I honestly don't remember what the printer was in those days but it was probably very noisy and used continuous paper which had to be ripped into sheets and have the sprocket holes ripped off too! These days she has a laptop which bamboozles her regularly but she has just about managed to use Zoom during the current lockdown. Thank goodness for TeamViewer remote support!

When my good wife of 48 years and I wed, she was the proud owner of an old Remington portable typewriter. We used the hell out of it for personal letters and what ever needed to be typed, even my kids used it just a little when they were in grade school. When the end of those word processors was in sight, I purchased a cheaper model that had only one line of text but did have spell checker built in so it made me a much better writer. By the time Workers Comp sent me to college for "re-education" the day of the computer was at hand. I found a third hand laptop computer, a 386 SX with monochrome, that served me through college and got me hooked on laptops. Anyhow thanks a billion for the video, it brought back some great memories of days long gone now.

@matthewghali2987

6 жыл бұрын

Jerry Ericsson thanks for the stories, and reminding viewers that not everyone's family could afford a new computer, no matter how much "better" they were. There's so many negative comments in this thread, so its nice hearing a few more grounded stories. Take care!

Last year I actually had to repair two very similar machines from Brother: the LW-200 and LW-250. An elderly customer of mine still prefers them to her state-of-the-art office pc when it comes to certain tasks. Why? Because: BECAUSE

@Xilog

5 жыл бұрын

She just likes to do it the old way

@b3h8t1n

4 жыл бұрын

I'm the same way with my brother wp1700😏

I love that you have at least two files from high school containing They Might Be Giants lyrics.

Why am I even watching this? I have never owned or used one of these things. The click clacks the machine makes as it types are relaxing though.

oh man, please tell me you're going to do more of these. LGR and 8-bit guy are great but the more the merrier!

@timmowarner

6 жыл бұрын

If you like this and 8-bit Guy you should check out Techmoan, too!

@FoxMulder78

6 жыл бұрын

And VWestlife.

@tristanjacobucci

6 жыл бұрын

My thoughts exactly and don't forget Techmoan

@fiatlux8828

6 жыл бұрын

8bitguy is too busy hoarding free shit to make videos that aren't kit builds

@BertGrink

6 жыл бұрын

and don't forget 'Obsolete Geek' and 'databits'

my mom bought a PWP 1400 sometime around 1991 or so. the display works very similar to yours here, but it's much, much smaller--one line of about forty characters is all the user can see at one time when they're editing a document in memory. no media drive is present, and saving is only available to the internal memory with no provisions for export. I have vivid memories of scrolling left for literal minutes while attempting to compose a three-page paper for middle school.

@Reziac

6 жыл бұрын

I had one very similar to yours (it was a Brother, don't recall the model number) -- two line screen and 25k of LINEAR memory, so to get anywhere you hadn't set a bookmark (IIRC it could set up to 10 bookmarks), it was scroll and scroll and scroll, and when memory got close to full it got so slow you could watch it pushing bytes uphill one at a time. It had permanent storage (tho no floppy drive) which at the time was fabulous. I used it for a long time after I got a PC because it could print a template that the PC could not (at least not without lots of futzing with advance codes in WordPerfect). Eventually the machine lost its marbles and began printing gibberish, and off to the recycler it went. I still have some of the printwheels.

@jamestheotherone742

6 жыл бұрын

Same here. I wrote entire short stories and homework assignments, 40 characters at a time. You have to remember the context of the time. It was a hell of a lot better than typing on paper and having to retype edits.

@Xilog

5 жыл бұрын

I have a rather modern brother actually, I think it was still being made up until recently. No storage, I don't know how much memory, and- no kidding, 1 by 16 display. There's type as you go or line-by line, which you type a whole line (it will refuse to go farther than the limit), and as you type it goes forward to show where you are. And once you're satisfied, hit enter and it prints the line. It actually has some nice features, and I occasionally power it up to see again.

My S.C. PWP had a separate monitor and the screen on the typewriter was smaller, I guess since I had a monitor, you didn't need it. So you could read nearly a page and easily make corrections with the arrows and back button. It was so neat it made me want to write letters. It was really cool to sit back and watch it type. Sadly, I sent it to a friend when I got a PC and apparently there was a paper clip between the keys and it shorted out when he plugged it in. Things progress so rapidly now that we've become unimpressed with even the most sophisticated stuff. The PWPs were so groundbreaking compared to a typewriter, or at least they seemed that way at the time.

I love it! My high school had a few in the mid 90's and I enjoyed them very much!

That was fun to watch! I worked at Smith Corona way back when and I worked on the "re-work line". We fixed the PWP boards that didn't pass inspection. I don't remember anything specific about the chips or software, my job was to put the board on a test fixture which would then display something like part # what ever. I would then just replace that. I didn't need any electronic/computer knowledge just had to know how to solder. There is a single huge circuit board in these and I remember that the first batch of boards was ordered before the engineers had completely finalized the layout so we spent a lot of time just adding jumper wires and cutting some of the runs on the board. At the time, the choices for office work were basically an electric typewriter or a computer and dot matrix printer. These were something like 1/3 the cost of a typical office computer and printer. I think these machines were also tested to/rated at one million keystrokes.

@joeltunnah

4 жыл бұрын

rob biemer, no comparison on print quality between these beautiful daisy wheel machines and horrid dot matrix printing. Even my 2018 canon inkjet print quality looks bad next to them.

Beginning of the video: "This machine is slow." Me: "Slow? Ha! Clearly, this guy's never used a manual typewriter." Middle of video: (Pulls out an old manual typewriter)

@areoants9453

4 жыл бұрын

Even better when he actually started typing on it, with moderate speed to boot!

@PinoyBowlerGS92

4 жыл бұрын

Imagine a virus would get in the “Corona” Typewritter-Computer.

@fun_ghoul

4 жыл бұрын

@@PinoyBowlerGS92 It's not susceptible to viruses, but you could probably type up some grade A hysterical paranoia on it.

@locke103

3 жыл бұрын

@@ericolens3 ...not the worst thing i heard from an inept computer user, but it's just made my top five.

@PanAndScanBuddy

3 жыл бұрын

I imagined you pulling out your own manual typewriter like "I'll show you what slow is!"

I'm amazed that you (or anyone) even has one of these machines. This is exactly what I used my first year of teaching! It was unquestionably faster than my hunt-and-peck method of typing PLUS it allowed me to correct errors "on the fly." It was both a time and headache saver since I often had to do many duplicate copies of a single document. Using the standard carbon paper sheets of the time on a standard typewriter meant that even one mistake in the document required retyping EVERYTHING all over again. With this machine, I could type and edit the document into memory, save it to disk, and then type as many copies as I wanted after that--using carbon paper--to perfection! A year later Apple came out with their APPLE I computer (which was quickly replaced by the Apple II) with it's true word "processing" capability--and this machine became an overnight dinosaur. But, either way, these became (for me) a true time saver--more because I only had to correct errors once (on my screen proof copy), and then I could make as many copies as needed, even if they were a week, month, or even year apart--thanks to the document's being saved on disk.

I love how you didn't cut while it was thinking giving us a real sense of how it would be to use it

The sound that thing makes when it starts is the manliest thing i've ever heard. *(SLAM) (BUZZ) (CLUNK) (BUZZ)* If only it was powered by buff beard-wearing men shoveling coal into a steam engine.

@acoolerhandle

4 жыл бұрын

In a way, It could be, considering coal power plants are a thing.

@Milamberinx

3 жыл бұрын

I used the typewriter of the secretary in my dad's company a few times, it would have been an IBM Selectric with the golf ball. That thing was TERRIFYING.

@qrstasdf6473

3 жыл бұрын

1:15

I wanted to make fun of the nerdiness of your high school assignment, but Twelve Angry Men is one of my most favorite movies.

@wilkgr

6 жыл бұрын

We used it last year for school, and it's a great movie.

@thethrashyone

5 жыл бұрын

I was shown that movie in both middle and high school, oddly enough. It is a good movie to be sure. I distinctly remember my English teacher in high school cracking a joke that "if this movie were made today, it'd probably be called 'Seven Angry Men and Five Pissed Off Women'."

Oh hey, my grandmother had one of these. It was the last in a long series of typewriters she had throughout her life. I might have it in my basement right now, in fact. I remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time, and it was a great sort of psychological bridge to the power of word processing for someone who had spent the previous 40+ years as a conventional typist. Switching straight from an electric typewriter to a PC would have been beyond the level of patience she had for technological change, but going from the Selectric to this to a PC worked.

Video editing and charisma have really improved in two years man, proud of you!

We had one of those, or a member of its illustrious family. Dark days ... Thank you for typing on the actual typewriter - that was a pleasant trip down memory lane.

Lol loading text is still faster than the text boxes in Ocarina of Time.

@tf2engineer106

5 жыл бұрын

You’re not wrong

@keiyakins

5 жыл бұрын

Even the printer is faster than Pokemon Diamond and Pearl

I had been mulling the idea of starting a tech channel over in my head, but wasn’t sure about it. When I saw your paper with the date on it and you said that you were in high school at the time, I think it pushed me into the “I’m going to do this” camp. I really appreciate all of your content, and I wish you the beat. Thanks for doing what you do.

@gregdaweson4657

Жыл бұрын

Well, how did it go?

@TothefarDale

Жыл бұрын

@@gregdaweson4657 I didn't do so. I whiled away my time getting into IT for a living and being annoyed by customers, essentially people being people. I still have a Curta Calculator that I would like to show the world, but I don't know when.

I typed "coronavirus" on the search bar, and KZread gave me this result !!!

@renderproductions1032

3 жыл бұрын

Perfect.

that noise of the thing typing on its own is amazing.

Yay, more TMBG! I don't know why this makes me so happy!

My family had one of these as a kid; that rapid fire typing sound takes me straight back to my childhood. I swear I can smell it.

“the jacket is back because, because.” made me laugh so hard

I love the shelf in the background. Really nicely decorated!

I had a Brother version of this 25 years ago! It worked okay, but my lasting memory is the GRZZZZZZZZ of the 3.5 drive grinding away as it loaded files. Thanks for the memories!

I only recently came upon an subscribed to your excellent KZread channel. The jacket, and the retro jazz Outro are your signatures man keep it up. (Once again thanks for your cross country trip on the train). I used Somethings similar to this in 1991 for a college paper but the disk crashed but my professor gave me an extension and I was able to rewrite the five page paper over the weekend on a different word processor and completed the class. )The next year I bought my first Apple Computer with a laser printer and never look back)!

Thanks for bringing these old friends back to life 🙏

That set is beautiful, man. Also I think it's better with the jacket.

I've been watching for a while, and just wanted to say its been wonderful to watch your channel and content grow!

Love your channel. You called that hybrid slow multiple times. I remember people using those when I worked in the financial aid office of WMU in 1987. Only the most preferred employees got them because they were the high tech of the time. That is, they were the fastest thing in 1987 apart from a computer, which were comparatively expensive. Wow, what a memory.

@nicholasbodley2238

2 жыл бұрын

Regording terminology, the carriage carries the paper and moves it sidewise. What shifts is the type bavket, almost sure.

I can't say why, but it's 2020 and the name of this machine sounds contagious.

Great video man, as always! I loved the background, you did an awesome job putting those shelves together.

This typewriter at the end triggers the feeling of typing in my brain...... This memory is over 20 years old

I love that you used it for actual Homework!! It’s beautifully nerdy 🤓 I love it!

I love the jacket it shows a true dad lack of care about what others think.

that sounds when it prints. wow.

The sound of my childhood Sunday afternoons with my Nan typing her stories.

Man! You have upped your production quality so much in the last two years. The content is just as fantastic as always but I forgot just how far you've made it in terms of production. Awesome work dude, hope you read this some day.

this channel is my new addiction. Cant stop watching...

Thanks for uploading this. I vaguely knew what they were thanks to an old Stephen King novel or story, but my family only owned a manual typewriter before our first home computer so I've never seen one of these in action. On a related note, we used to have an electric typewriter at work that wasn't a brand I'd heard of before (Swintec), so I looked it up online one day out of curiosity. Aside from that model (which looked thoroughly 80s) still being listed as actively manufactured, they had a menu item for "Word Processors". Turns out, for a mere $1,678.00 (!!!) in 2018 money you can still buy a Swintec 8500C "Word Processing System" with 3.5" floppy disk storage, 60K "Large Working Memory", and an 80-character by 25-line CRT! Amusingly, they also have a bright red warning that "this Product cannot be used to access the internet or to play games."

@s0men00bb

5 жыл бұрын

Actual product page with manual(s) included ! 😂 www.swintec.com/14-8500c.html

@Xilog

5 жыл бұрын

@@s0men00bb Thanks, that's hilarious. I want someone to buy one and keep it in their collection, a brand new 8500c!

Man, that was a trip into nostalgic land. I was using a mechanical typewriter for my school assignments well into the mid 90s, while my classmates were all using this thing called windows 95... I was so envious of them haha

The printing process is so satisfying to watch

My mom had one of the spiritual ancestors to this thing in high school (late '80s). I later claimed it and wrote my first novel on it in 2008. It has a (much smaller) screen and no floppy drive (apparently it had some RAM and you could compose and edit a document using the small screen and then print it, but I never messed around with that), but it definitely had the word/line eraser function and a very similar 'typo' beep sound . It sounded EXACTLY like this when when you switched it on (via a very similar sliding power switch). In 2008, I could still find ink cartridges (and correction tape) easily at the local Staples. This was a good thing, because an ink cartridge apparently only does about 10,000 words.

Jess, you said, "off the cuff". Well played into the jacket theme. Great look for you host, nice way in clashing with an average tech look.

I like the jacket!

Thank for this video! This typewriter got me through college in the late 80"s

Oh wow. We have so much in common. In high school, I had a PC AND a typewriter, but for personal writing I always loved this thing. I even used it for writing school papers I was sure would be published one day or needed to be saved for posterity (the cringe!) The romantic feel of a typewriter and the convenient editing of a computer. Good times!