Oh, boy, HAVE I.
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Replying to @mwichary @makmanalp
There was a time in our history where you could have a pretty good living repairing only Selectrics, full time!
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Replying to @mwichary
Oh god ... I was cleaning out some old tabs (yes, I have a problem) and had an old tab open from almost a year ago from the orange website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14796247 … and was kinda shocked by a thread implying the model m buckling spring was a 2 tier knockoff ... of the selectric!
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Replying to @makmanalp
Oh, that’s a nice thread. Thanks! Yeah, I think it went like: Selectric » beam spring » buckling Model F » buckling Model M, right? I typed on some Selectrics researching my book. I was genuinely amazed how much they felt like computer keyboards.
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Replying to @mwichary
Apparently! My ignorance of the subject is showing. I had only heard about selectrics because the golf-ballish type heads get a mention in this wonderful example of early digital humanities: https://archive.org/details/travelsincompute00schn … /cc
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Replying to @makmanalp @liza
Ah, I’ll check it out. Selectric is basically amazing. It has so many things we’d recognize from computers, but realized in the physical world. It’s basically like the last movie before CGI. It’s doomed, of course, but you can’t help but admire it.
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It also understands it lives in the physical world, so it has e.g. built-in accommodations for wear and tear. Not to mention of people doing people things (like pressing a key in the middle of carrier return, or releasing Shift too early).
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This is fascinating - it's a relic of a different way of thinking about the lifetime of a "consumer" product. Also, took me a sec but I dug up some passages (sorry about the terrible quality)pic.twitter.com/fMFnjcpZ1t
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This all in reference to OCR software (In the 70s!!!) confusing 'O's with '0's.
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Ha, but of course. Thanks for the photos!
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