IBM Typewriters

IBM originated with the Hollerith punch card tabulators first made in 1889. By the 1930s tabulators had become a big industry with Powers-Samas and British Tabulating Machines Co amongst the competitors. One of IBMs strengths was that it did almost everything in business information processing at the time. The company had been assembled by Charles Ranlett Flint from the Computing Scale Corporation, International Time Recording and Bundy Manufacturing Company as well as Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company.

The heart of IBMs data-processing ability at the time was the tabulator or more correctly unit-record processing equipment. Tabulators are not computers, the data is generally on punch-cards and programs are fixed. IBM was making both these and calculating machines based around its lines of statistical analysis machinery.

IBM had begun to look at language related products. For instance Thomas J Watson Seniour had supported Edward A. Filene's development of simultaneous translation equipment in the 1920s. A Filene-Finlay translator was installed in the League of Nations in 1931.

IBM entered the typewriter market when it bought Electromatic Typewriters Inc in 1933. IBM had not been involved in alphabetic processing much before this time. The IBM 400 series accounting machines introduced in 1931 were the first with with an alphabetic printing capability.

Electromatic had an odd history.

Electromatic

James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented a power-operated typewriter in 1914. Smathers became an accountant and credit-manager for a company in Kansas City and had taught shorthand typing. He realised that typing could be quicker if the key-presses were lighter and devised a way of using a motor to power the keys, activated by mechanical linkages. Then military service intervened. On his return in 1920 he applied to have his patent extended and developed the design further.

Northeast Electric Company was interested in finding markets for their new lines of electric motors, so they took the design on. Northeast Electric produced the motor and power chain. Remington produced a typewriter mechanism based on it's model 12. Remington were in negotiation for the takeover that would produce Remington Rand, so they couldn't commit to a contract to make the device.

Northeast Electric began production of it's own Electromatic Typewriters in 1929, but a year earlier they had been taken over by Delco, a division of General Electric (Delco made the first starter-motors). Delco weren't interested in typewriters and spun the company off as Electromatic Typewriters.

Electromatic built one of the first automatic typewriters using a mechanism like a piono roll, then improved the machine to use five hole paper tape like a teleprinter or seven hole paper tape like a Linotype.

In 1933 IBM bought Electromatic.

IBM spent a million dollars redesigning the Electromatic as the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01. Smathers himself joined IBM and worked in development engineering, inventing the proportional spacing mechanism used in the IBM Executive series. The Electric typewriter series was a successful project and over the years IBM developed the design making it less obviously a typewriter on a motor base. The model 01 introduced in 1935 was followed by the Model A in 1949, B in 1954, C in 1959 and D in 1967. Production of the Electromatic series overlapped with the introduction of the Selectric.

Equipped with its proportional spacing mechanism the electromatic printed so well its output could easily be mistaken for typesetting. The first machine was apparently presented to President Roosevelt. The Armistice documents that ended World War 2 and the original UN Charter were typed on IBM Executive machines.

IBM had a near monopoly of the punch card machinery in the late 1930s and expanding into paper tape and automatic typewriters could have brought antitrust issues. IBM sold the automatic product line to Commercial Controls Corporation of Rochester, New York, formed by several IBM employees. CCC went on developing the machine separately and in 1957 they were purchased by calculator maker Friden.

The Friden Flexowriter is therefore a relative of the Electromatic. The Flexowriter was in production into the 1970s.

As well as it's use as an office typewriter the Electromatic was modified as a computer printer. There were high speed drum and band printers, but they had multiple wheels and hammer-banks and were generally attached to fast and expensive computer systems. The Electromatic could be used as a terminal and printer on the IBM 632 accounting machine, and the IBM 1620 computer. A version of the typewriter modified by Soroban Engineering was also used as the console typewriter for the DEC PDP-1.

A special version of the machine was the Electromatic Table Printing Machine. This was an IBM 016 keypunch connected to an Electromatic Proportional Spacing Typewriter producing material good enough for photographic typesetting. It was designed by Columbia University Astronomy Professor Wallace Eckert specifically to produce almanacs because of their importance to navigation. Some almanacs had been printed from ordinary computing machinery printers but the print lacked clarity. Wallace Eckert and IBM were therefore the first to produce navigation material directly - fulfilling the dream Charles Babbage had when he thought of the Difference Engine. It is though something like half a dozen machines were eventually built. One was installed in the UK at HMNAO Herstmonceux Castle.

Electromatics were not all that well suited to being computer output devices. Modification needed a switch under every key and an electromagnet under every typebar. Shift involved lifting the whole typebasket. However they and the Friden Flexowriter were very heavily built, the Friden specially so.

By 1958 IBM were reputedly getting 8% of their revenue from sales of typewriters

IBM Selectric

In 1961 IBM introduced the ‘Selectric’ typewriter series, often called golf-ball typewriters because of the appearance of the print element - a ball with 88 characters embossed on it.

The Selectric was an unusual invention. IBM bought some of the rights from Marx Toys who were producing a child's typewriter toy using a similar ball mechanism. IBM made the plastic lettered drum smaller and gave it a hard nickel plate.

The platen and paper are static, it doesn't slide along with each character as most typewriters at the time did. Instead the print-element moves on a carriage like that of a teletype.

The mechanism is reminiscent of a teleprinter and of a Blickensderfer typewriter.

The lever under each key presses codes onto rods. A couple of mechanical binary selection mechanisms (called a whippletree) turn the binary code into an analog movement of a pivot. These mechanisms connect to wire ribbons that are wound across the carriage space in such a way that the carriage is free to move. One ribbon turns and the other tilts the ball which then lifts up to hit the correct character onto the page.

IBM put considerable effort into ergonomics. The keyboard is somewhat dished so that keys more nearly meet the users fingers head on. The key-bases are square, rising to a slightly smaller key-top. Its the style of keyboard found on computer terminals rather that traditional typewriters. The user gets some feedback when their fingers are misplaced but there is no space for the fingers to slide into. There is also some tactile feedback through the keys, a key that has been successfully pushed has a feel to it.

The design of the Selectric is credited to Eliot Noyes who was commissioned in 1956 to create a house-style for IBM. It is credited as the first house-style program in US business and presumably drew some lessons from Olivetti's industrial design success.

The Selectric was not particularly thought of as a computer input-output device. Bob Bemer says he tried to persuade the designers to have 64 characters for ASCII computer output rather than the 2x 44 they had chosen. They said Naw! This will never be anything but a correspondence typewriter.

IBM's typewriter plant in Lexington, Kentucky subsequently became Lexmark.

Typewriters have some relationship to computers. Teletypes and the IBM Electromatic as well as the Friden Flexowriter were all common as terminals and printers. Right through to the 1970s, however, they don't seem to have been connected in the designers conceptual framework. Typewriters and computer input / output devices remained separate ideas right through the mid 1980s until the idea of a typewriter and the skill-sets that went with it became the word-processor

Selectric typewriters proved very popular. There was a troublesome linkage between the whippletree and the rotate-ribbon that sometimes had the ball strike the page side-on but otherwise they gave beautiful print. In 1971 the product line was refreshed with a Selectric-II series which had dual-pitch (10cpi or 12cpi) and there was an option for a correcting ribbon.

Print from the Selectric could be good enough that a special Selectric Composer model was produced with proportional print for page-setting.

Selectric as Terminal

Selectric typewriters did, of course, become popular as data-processing terminals. Selectric typewriters were faster than any other low cost serial printer of the time, and the platen didn't move from side to side (which the Electromatic and Friden did) so it could more easily take continuous-feed paper.

IBM themselves introduced the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) in 1964. The tape cassttes could hold 25 kilobytes of data. A version with two tapes could provide mail-merge. Another version of the MT/ST could emulate an IBM 2741 terminal. There was a tape reader that could connect to an IBM 360 mainframe, so the Selectric could be used as a data entry terminal.

The Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter (MC/ST) in 1969 . Magnetic cards were curiously popular in the early 1970s - at the time it seemed amazing to cram a couple of thousand characters onto a card.

These machines provided basic word-processing abilities.

Selectric typewriters were used by other computer manufacturers. The popular British BCL Sadie and Suzie computers had a Selectric for input and output.

A Selectric III was introduced in 1980 with a 96 character ball. By this time Diablo daisy-wheel printers were providing equally good print at twice the speed. IBM replaced the Selectric with the Wheelwriter in 1984

Adapting the Selectric as a computer device meant adding solenoids under the whippletree and micro-switches to the keyboard rods. There was then the problem that the Selectric had been designed as a typewriter and it's internal mechanical code was neither IBM's EDCDIC or ASCII, so code conversion was needed. The machine was also built to run at a typing pace of around 14 characters per second so that couldn't be exceeded but if it wasn't maintained the clutch would wear out. The BCL Suzie had a special group of four cards ( a couple of hundred chips, 12 volt logic) to convert codes too and from the printer.

There are still IBM-Selectric typewriters out there, in homes where someone prefers a proper keyboard and doesn't want to stare at a screen. In a corner of an office there will be a Selectric kept to type responses on forms or to address envelopes that won't go through the laser-printer.

The IBM Selectric became a huge success, taking 75% of the US business market. Manufacturers of flying-key machines were in trouble. Selectric typewriters were built to last, but the technology had only a few years ahead of it. A year after the Selectric-II was launched in 1971 one of the technologies that would destroy the typewriter market was taking shape - the cutely named daisy-wheel.

No idea lasts forever. The IBM Selectric took a big share of the office market from Remington, Royal, Smith-Corona and Underwood. In 1972 just after IBM had launched the new, improved Selectric II a company called Diablo started producing daisy-wheel printers. A year later Diablo were taken over by Xerox who used them to market word-processing equipment. David S. Lee who had led the Diablo team left and founded Qume.

IBM adopted daisy-wheel technology as the Wheelwriter and Actionwriter 1. The Selectric remained in production until it was replaced by the Wheelwriter in 1984.

Wheelwriter

IBM apparently got the Wheelwriter technology from Qume although by the 1980s Canon, Smith-Corona, Olivetti and NEC were all producing variants of the idea. Since something like a daisy-wheel can be traced back to the Blikensderfer typewriter of 1893 (or even the Hughes or Wheatstone printing telegraph). The patent rights surrounding the idea were presumably challengeable. Where the Blickensderfer was mechanical, however, the daisywheel gets its speed and mechanical simplicity from electronics.

A daisywheel printer is pretty much like a Selectric or indeed a dot-matrix or modern inkjet in overall design. A paper feed motor moves paper across a platen where the printhead will strike. The printhead sits on a carriage that moves back and forth, powered by a motor.

Where the Selectric type-element was rotated and tilted by taught metal ribbons the daisywheel is rotated by a servo-motor. The wheel rotates to position and is then hit by a solenoid driven hammer, the daisy petal shoots forward, strikes the ribbon and makes the character image on the page.

Daisywheels are pretty much made possible by electronics and motors. The printers need three motors, paper-feed, carriage drive and daisy-wheel together with the circuits to control them. There are arguments for both steppers and DC servos. Steppers can use simple circuits, but if so they are not very fast. Some daisywheel printers designed as electronic typewriters could only manage 10 characters per second and a good typist would outpace them. DC servo-motors are usually faster. Diablo machines could manage 30 characters per second, about double a typists speed but very useful for electronic output.

Daisy-wheel print was very crisp and neat. the printers could take more or less any paper a typewriter could because the paper handling was similar. Carbon copies would work well. Print from a multistrike ribbon was good; from a single-strike black ribbon excellent. The daisy-wheel mechanism is motor driven so most were capable of proportional spacing.

Because it is inherently a computer based device the daisywheel devices were amongst the first to appear both with and without keyboards (Some early dot-matrix printers had the option of a keyboard)

Problems with daisy-wheel printers were that they were too slow for computer output taking about a minute to complete a page. Cut sheet feeding was still unusual so secretarial staff had a bout a minute before loading another page. The printers were also quite noisy. It was like trying to take a phone call next to pneumatic drill

What killed the daisywheel printer was the laser printer and the inkjet. Both gave good print quality and in the laser printer case was at least 10 times as fast.

IBM Quietwriter

Daisywheel wasn't the only possibility. IBM came up with the Quietwriterwhich was a thermal transfer typewriter using a resistive ribbon. The printhead itself was just 40 small electrodes. The ribbon had an electrically resistive polymer layer followed by an aluminium layer so when the electrodes turned on it generated localised heat in a wax/resin release layer putting a carbon-black print layer on the page. Curiously the printer could also reverse the action, so the typewriter version could backspace, heat the ribbon but not sufficiently to print and the resulting stickiness would pull an unwanted character off the page.

With a 40 electrode head Quietwriters were capable of 240 dots per inch vertically and 360 dpi horizontally. Print speeds were claimed at 40 to 60 characters per second and with typical fonts and documents reviewers saw about 25 characters per second.

Unlike claims for silent writing made by the older typewriter companies this genuinely did make no more than a whisper. Just the sound of the paper and printhead moving. A 40-electrode printhead gave much better print than dot-matrix. Printed material was almost indistinguishable from daisy-wheel print. The Quietwriter 7 typewriter of 1984 seems to have been the first in the series. Subsequently they developed the Quietwriter printer (IBM 5201-1) The model 2 (5201-2) also had high performance graphics capabilities. The Quietwriter III (IBM5202) extended things further. IBM boasted the products were made on robot production lines at their new Lexington factory.

The Quietwriter might have been too expensive to run. A 150,000 character (30,000 words) ribbon was priced at $12 and a 4 million character printhead at $20 (about 10 cents per page). But even if the cost of ribbons could have been halved the technology probably wasn't going anywhere - print was too slow.

Thermal Printers

Manufacturers showed quite a lot of interest in thermal print technology in the 1980s. Apple's first printer was the Silentype released for the Apple II in 1980. It was a badged Trendcom Model 200 but using Apple's own logic on a special interface board. The main problem was that the printer was based on rolls of material like thermal fax - and this didn't archive well.

Lexmark

In 1991 IBM sold its printer and supplies division to investment firm Clayton & Dubilier as Lexmark. (Headquarters is in Lexington, Kentucky). Lexmark is a $4 Bn operation with 13 thousand employees. Lexmark make Laser and inkjet printers.