The correcting feature of typewriters is not what I thought

I was really taken aback when I learned how this works.

Links 'n' stuff
The Engineer Guy's video explaining the Selectric mechnism
(It also has way better high-speed footage!)

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[TechnologyConnections]

I know, forgive me, the typewriter in the thumbnail ain't the one that does the correcting. It's just far prettier! It's also brown.
Here's The Engineer Guy's great video on the Selectric:

[MsStLiz]

Just had one of those "floppy disk = save icon" moments where I realized that those little tabs you slide to adjust your margins in Word were once actual physical things on a typewriter.

[gudenau]

"The only thing better than perfect is standardized!" is an amazing quote.

[GraniteGeek]

The Selectric was a glorious machine - the keys were so wonderfully balanced and positioned and the golfball so fast that I could hit 100 wpm on it in my typewriting prime. It's a great example of a technology reaching absolute perfection just as it becomes irrelevant.

[testosteronic]

My Nana let me play on her typewriter as a kid, I remember her showing me how to undo, and being amazed by the way a letter could be removed from physical paper like that. I remember investigating the "undo" ribbon to find the letters on it. I'm young enough to have grown up with home computers being common, undoing things seemed like a digital-only possibility, and that's why the undo on the typewriter was so impressive. So was learning that vinyl records work by having soundwaves carved into them, and then the needle running through those grooves turns them back into a sound. When you grow up with computers, digital things all working on the same principles, the physical, mechanical ways things can be done feels ingenious

[TheInfiniteAmo]

"Destroying these ribbon cartridges was often a matter of national security!"
Fun fact, the standard form for end-of-day security checks in military buildings in the U.S. still lists destroying typewriter ribbons as a necessary task.

[invisibledave]

When I was in middle school for typewriting class, they had removed the white-out strip so you couldn't undo things. I learned that the typewriter had an undo letter and an undo line feature. Since there was no white-out strip, if you hit undo, the keys would use the ink strip and make the letter on the paper. I then realized the ingenious thing about the undo line, I could use it to cheat.
When the teacher made us sit and type the same long sentence over and over again while she walked around checking on us, I would just slowly type it the first time and then manually scroll the wheel down one notch and hit undo line. The typewriter would then re-type the entire line for me really fast. I would repeat these steps until I was at the end of the page. The teacher thought I was the fastest typer in the entire class. The trick was just to make sure to not make a mistake on the first line.

[ilearnedsomethingnewtoday]

I worked as a legal secretary from 2008-2010. We used typewriters all the time to fill out preprinted forms, for envelopes, and to add quick notes to previously printed documents. I always loved the feel and sound of the typewriter. It was even more enjoyable than a mechanical keyboard.

[PHOTGUY]

I used an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter. You could use different font sizes and it could store pages in memory. This enabled creating a sheet with linework, corrections etc. and they just playing it back out. At that time some people were surprised seeing a typewriter typing out a sheet on its own with nobody pressing the keys.

[rocbolt]

In high school there was a specific state sponsored college scholarship that *required* the application form to be filled out with a typewriter. Our school post-secondary counselor dug one out of storage for the dozen or so of us that wanted to apply to line up and use in the school office area. The whole afternoon teachers wandered by and were staggered by the anachronistic _tack tack tacking_ going on in the corner. And yay that was twenty years ago now! Wonder how long that typewriter requirement hung on, and how much it was the wishes of an eccentric millionaire vs a quirky test of ones ability to find and utilize disappearing hardware...

[echoptic]

I love the sentence "The only thing better than perfect is standardized". So simple yet so true

[timmackey]

I think a whole show about the various carryovers from older technology to modern day (ie keyboard layout) would be fascinating.

[beffiesv]

My grandfather was an IBM sales engineer. All of us had a Selectric and damn what an amazing typewriter. He would write us letters using the script font ball. Totally miss that guy.

[jonlewis]

"The paper is (stationery)"

Beautifully done, just the perfect amount of afterwards.

[Matt-wcmf]

I would love a full Technology Connections deep dive into typewriters. I was bracing for a full explanation of the arrangement of the QWERTY keyboard. ("No, it was not to make you type slower, it was to prevent the slappy things that were close together from actuating at the same time and jamming")

[BurgerSoda]

I find it quite ironic that WASD is a different color. It’s as if they expect us to game on it, when it can really only write text.

[presidentkiller]

A lot of "analog" conventions from typewriters persist to this day, not only in how we type things on the computer, but also how the computer reads and displays them on the screen (Data Processing). The carriage return might not exist anymore in physical form, but the computer still needs it to read and display information properly. The character is not visible on screen but still exists internally as "\r\n" or CRLF (Carriage Return Line Feed), even HTML uses it as a "line break" represented by the "<br />" tag. We programmers use it a lot.

[h.l-a]

I realise writing actual subtitles and not just relying on Google's auto thing probably takes a lot of time and I just want to say, once again; Thank you So much for yet another awesome video with actual subtitles! ♡ it truly makes a huge difference!

[maryjordan]

My first typewriter was from my aunt who used it in the 1940's. I typed most of my college papers on it(so did my sister). It was a big black hulking thing with a large carrige bar. My next typewriter was a processor type from the late 1980's. I'll be 74 next September and the typewriter you first plunked down was my dearest wish in the 1960's that I didn't get. Your video brought alot of memories. Thanks!😊

[grlakes]

My family owns a funeral home and up until Wayne county switched to electronic death certificates a few years ago we used a type writer to fill them out. We used the same model you had in the video!