[cctalk] Re: Computer Museum uses GreaseWeazle to help exonerate Maryland Man

The Selectric was a really nice mechanism for swappable typeface work. And versions of it could do proportional spacing, well enough for some commercial typesetting work (like magazines). Of course, they weren't the first design for swappable typefaces; that would be the Hammond typewriters from around 1900. Which, by the way, came with two choices of keyboard: a QWERTY keyboard, and their "ideal" keyboard which is semicircular and has two levels of shift (one for capital letters and the other for punctuation, corresponding to the three rows of characters on the rotating type shuttle that carries the characters to be imprinted). Come to think of it, a version of the Hammond ("Varityper") could do proportional spacing too, many decades before the IBM "Composer". Fastest, perhaps, but that doesn't permit immediate feedback -- you can't see what you typed. Not unless you have a display in between. For fingers to page in real time, the best answer is probably the dot matrix printer -- LA120 could do 120 characters/second as the name indicates, and chances are that could be beaten with some effort if it mattered. That "fastest typist" article says the pre-computer record was done with an IBM Electric typewriter -- that would be a machine with conventional type arms, propelled by a mechanism involving a rotating rubber roller. Interesting that those were faster than the Selectric. And they could be hooked to computers; the IBM 1620 model 1 had such a setup (in the Model 2 it became a Selectric), and other computers of that era used things like the similar and very sturdy Friden Flexowriter. paul