That’s easy for computers that can hide things inside, but what about typewriters? From their very first year, it has always been an issue of what to do when you needed to print a character that your keyboard didn’t have.
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Then, you could purchase any extra characters you needed. And if you wanted to type one, you’d grab it, and mount it quickly in the adapter, in front of the typebar…pic.twitter.com/dsqyoQh1gT
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And then, you would press a regular typewriter key. The typebar would swing normally, but then hit the just-inserted character, then the ribbon, and then the paper. In a sense, Typit functioned almost like a parasite.pic.twitter.com/w0oJZJ8aXP
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(A rather momentary parasite. Typit creator promised printing any character should take only ~4 seconds, with the quality identical as the typewriter’s “native” text.)pic.twitter.com/CZHIPU4z6x
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Some 1,500 characters were available, effectively creating the only “typewriter Unicode” I know of – math symbols, different alphabets, fractions, even keys your old typewriter might be missing (e.g. digit 1 or &). It seems each character would cost you about $10.pic.twitter.com/ZOurxR8Xxm
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The system was in use in between 1950s and 1980s. I don’t think it was very popular, despite many ads in electronics, chemical, and other scientific periodicals – and despite some marketing gimmicks, like this one from 1970.pic.twitter.com/3vZbI9oiad
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There was even Typit II, actually compatible with the Selectric ball typewriters, a font-swapping tech coexisting with a character-swapping one.pic.twitter.com/PRcuFZHlFw
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Eventually both, and all the others, were undone by computers which allowed for 31 characters, then 63, then 127, then 255, and now god knows how many via Unicode. Early on, it happened did with Alt+numeric keypad combination (still works on Win – and Mac after enabling it)…pic.twitter.com/DjDExyDKXU
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…and then via graphical user interfaces and touch screens. But that’s a whole different story.pic.twitter.com/alSDuedsAu
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I love that Typit existed. It’s such a weird hack, and a clever way to solve a particular problem. It’s kind of like a Chrome extension or a Greasemonkey script for typewriters, once again blurring the lines. And speaking of which, I like it for one other reason:
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It is a proof that “press any key to continue” existed in the world before computers.
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(BTW this thread is dedicated to the hard work and inspiration that is
@shadychars.)Show this thread -
(I realize now that I forgot to do the most important visual juxtaposition – and notice that even the sizes of both containers are rather similar!)pic.twitter.com/6ypL074Oyv
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End of conversation
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