Mystery deepens: After searching for “british office photo 1980s,” I found a photograph of what seems like a similar keyboard – although in a two-colour scheme.pic.twitter.com/cnYjrpqA6j
Writing a book about the history of keyboards: http://aresluna.org/shift-happens · Design manager @figmadesign · Typographer · Occasional speaker · He/him
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Mystery deepens: After searching for “british office photo 1980s,” I found a photograph of what seems like a similar keyboard – although in a two-colour scheme.pic.twitter.com/cnYjrpqA6j
Solved! @leggca cracked the code. This is a British word processing machine called Wordplex.
@leggca found a 1987 documentary talking about Wordplex, then about to be acquired by Norsk Data. This bit in the video talks directly about the keyboard: https://youtu.be/dg8cPvm603w?t=677 …pic.twitter.com/IUZVPKcc0Y
This is how, in 1988, Norsk Data announced the merger.pic.twitter.com/VNKb2EfTtK
The last breath of Wordplex was in the 1990, and it will sound familiar to anyone studying PC history. Norsk Data created a version of Wordplex for IBM PC compatibles, called “Wordplex 100,” that went absolutely nowhere.
A sad ending for a company that once “owned a third of the UK marketing for word processing systems for the legal profession,” which is probably why it was there in all these earlier videos… and why nobody cares today: it was a boring office computer found in law offices.
“I have known some brilliant keyboards in my time. There was the lovely Wordplex 80-series devices with a soft rattle.” https://writerlywitterings.com/2017/08/30/keyboards-and-tools-of-the-trade/ … I wonder how many still survive, hidden in attics and weird places.
I scraped the bottom of the Internet and found a brochure of the early version of Wordplex, complete with awkward/sexist photos and an earlier colour scheme of the keyboard. It very much screams 1976. THE SCOPE OF THIS SYSTEM IS GOVERNED ONLY BY THE LIMITS OF YOUR CREATIVITYpic.twitter.com/VnL4FRLJ3Y
This feels overall like a fascinating corporate story: · Ventek renamed itself to Wordplex · AES merged with Ventek, but then split away again? · Wordplex started in California, then moved to Canada, but was mostly popular in the UK and had all engineering offices there?
I will shut up now. I know none of this really matters… but it’s fun to research something in depth.
Another cool ad, from 1978, found by @dasbub.
(Hilariously, the marketing phrase “the last word in word processing” was very popular, used by at least two more companies, including Apple.)pic.twitter.com/fMjsb9Zjhh
Oh, look, an obscure ad with the very same version of the computer as the original tweet! (I can quit this thread any time I want…)pic.twitter.com/mEuZppAnoi
Ah yes the steno pool.
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