That's right - a working electric typewriter!!! SO MUCH FUN. Now, I love Microsoft Word as much as the next person, but this thing is really cool. Sitting down with it, I feel like I should be starting the next great American novel, or perhaps writing a letter to the editor of some now-defunct newspaper. The thing vibrates when it's on, and there's a really satisfying "thunk" sound each time you type a letter and a great "ding" when you reach the end of a line. So I started messing around with it when I noticed that there is no numeral one anywhere on the typewriter. In the place where you'd expect to find the 1, there's a mysterious "M-R" key (any ideas as to what this does?). It seems that you can't type "1" without resorting to elementary arithmetic. You need to type:
and "cancel" the 2 or 4. The strange lack of 1, notwithstanding, it has a decent set of features. It has a correction ribbon and a whole slew of characters:
Then I realized that I'd never seen an email address, and certainly never a blog address typed on an actual typewriter, so there was only one thing to do:
Also, if anyone knows where to get a ribbon for a Smith-Corona Electra C/T, please let me know at the above email address.
Eli can it type an uppercase one: !, cause if you type ! with caps-lock on, you get 1.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, not only is there no 1, there is no ! either. I guess people in the typewriter days weren't very expressive.
ReplyDeleteNooooo! The point of the fun toy was that it was FREE. If we by accessories it increases the cost infinetly.
ReplyDeleteha ha, you used the coriour new font didn't you! classic
ReplyDeleteIt was a dark and stormy night...
ReplyDeleteSince no one else has provided the answer to your query, and assuming you weren't joking and really did not know the answer, you need a real baby boomer to answer your questions:
ReplyDeletel. There is a one on the typewriter, it's the lower case letter "l" as I typed at the beginning of the line. (l vs. 1)
2. MR stands for Margin Release; if you need to type one more letter or two at the end of the line, you can go beyond the fixed margin.
3. I think my typewriters had an exclamation mark, but I don't remember.
Of course it looks better with Courier than Arial fonts.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDelete1) I thought about that, but then I saw that the typeface for the "one" in the fractions is different than the typeface of lowercase-l.
2) Cool!
Anonymous, there is no such thing as an exclamation mark. Instead use a lowercase i, and flip the paper upside down when you read it.
ReplyDeletei.e Eurekai
Uh, wait that doesn't work.
i think my savta still has an electric typewriter, although we did finally convince/teach her to use the computer seven or eight years ago. she even does email now!
ReplyDeletefor a while when i was in high school, my dad had one of those typewrite-computer hybrid things that had a 5 line screen with a rudimentary word processor you could use before printing. he used it to do some of his billing forms...
Hahaha! I'm sitting here with an old Smith-Corona Galaxie. I googled to this blog looking for the purpose of that "M-R" key. :) To make an exclamation point you can do one of two things.
ReplyDelete1. Hold the space bar down and type single-quote period or
2. Type single-quote backspace period
!='. :)
I was the orginal anonymous, and I thought you made the exclamation mark using two characters and back spacing. I figured it included the period, but couldn't remember what the other character was. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI love the anachronism of the last 2 pics. Reminds me of this.
ReplyDeleteEli can you confirm that 14 comments is indeed a world record?
ReplyDelete15, maybe?
ReplyDeleteI took typing in High School in the 70's, so here is what we did: To make a 1, just use the lower case L = l. To make exclamation point, use the apostrophe, then backspace and use a period.
ReplyDelete