Friday 3 August 2018

Junk Hunt - Strange Typewriter Thing

I'm on the hunt for information, or even the actual thing... What thing?... Well, in the early 1990's my parents took me into a stationary store in Nottingham, I think it was Staples or Office World near the Post Office main buildings, so we're talking St Anns or City Centre ish, certainly behind the Victoria Centre.

Anyway, in there I saw a machine I was sorely tempted to get, it was a semi-electronic typewriter, so it had a form factor about 11" a typewriter keyboard with an LCD screen across the center, you typed could see the text then when you hit enter it write it to the typewriter as a nearly silent printed line...

It also simultaneously write this as an ASCII text file onto a 3.5" floppy which was inserted into the right hand side.

The one I saw was red, cherry red.

The print was a very strong, black, the ribbon was a one use thing once it had put a letter down if you came over the same piece of ribbon (by winding it back) and put another character it'd be missing the bits from the mask cut by writing the prior letter.

And... I loved it.....

I went to see this thing about six times.  I really wanted it to augment my then A-Level studies.  because it was silent, the keyboard had a tactile feel, but no click, the printing was this nearly silent swish and you got the text file from it... or you could put a text file into the disk, load it and it'd print the whole thing out in this lovely type.

Remember, at home I was toting a 9 pin Citizen 120D+ printer, so this really vibrant printing really appealed to me to present things.

If you have any idea what device I'm talking about, comment below!

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