21 Apr
2011
21 Apr
'11
12:36 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2011, Brian Lanning wrote:
I do not know precisely how fast my mother could type, but her
Selectric sounded like a machine gun when she got going. She never
had one "fly apart", but she did wear out more than one unit from
8-10-hour-days of multi-page-carbon-set production work (final copies
of court transcripts). She was paid by the page, so long stretches of
error-free typing was the only way to make a decent wage.
At one point in the early 1980s, her machine broke and she took it to
a new repair shop in town. The tech was puzzled at the wear he
observed during the triage until he watched her type to test out the
freshly-repaired unit. As she banged away at a high rate of speed for
a full page, the tech nodded and said to her, "you and I are going to
become good friends". He was right.
(Our 32K PET shared the home office with the Selectric. One afternoon
when I was noodling around on the PET and she was deep in production
mode, during a pause in the clatter, I remarked that someday soon,
she'd be doing all of that "on one of these" (meaning a computer, not
specifically a PET). She laughed. Less than five years later, she
switched to 512K Macs and an Apple LaserWriter I).
My mom was a secretary. ?She had an IBM
selectric. ?World's loudest
typewriter. ?She could type 90wpm on that thing. ?Oh man, what a
sound. It sat on a foam mat to try to absorb some of the vibration. ?I
used that for my papers until I got an original IBM 5150 and my school
got a much of Apple 2Es.
Rated top speed for the mechanism was 14.8 characters per second (about
150 WPM). ?But a 150 WPM typist (yes, I've met some!) would have bursts
substantially higher, and selectrics would come apart. At work, somebody succeeded in running one at 300
baud. ?Briefly.
That was discontinued when the "golfball" went flying into a sheetrock wall.
Wow. Who knew full-face-shields were needed in an office environment.
-ethan