IBM Selectric typewriter review - and how it works!

Skip to 15:57 for a typing demonstration.

I'm Thomas and I do keyboard videos and reviews. Today we look at the IBM Selectric typewriter, a legendary machine from the era before personal computers. This machine included a digital-to-analog converter that paved the way for computer printers, and is in a way the first step toward a computer keyboard as we know it. This is keyboard genesis, people! :)

The practice sentence was.... well, you can read it for yourself :) .

[danielhehir]

Engineering genius ! I used to work for IBM in 1979 repairing these machines. Never see them anymore. Died out like the dinosaur. There were over 600 fine adjustments in these selectrics. All had to be perfectly tuned to get it to work properly. In my first few weeks out in the field in Lansing, Mich. repairing them, I managed to drop a brand new machine on the floor from the top of the desk. It tipped over backwards and fell down on the floor, right on its four feet. I had to take it home that very night to set it all up again. Everything got knocked out of wack. It took me the whole night to fix it up again. The woman who used it got it back the next day... Not 100% in order again as I did have to go back to her office several times to adjust and readjust. A true nightmare for my new start on the job. It was something that I never told my boss about.. .. ;-)

[ComandanteJ]

Those keycaps look as modern as any current keyboard.

[DrathVader]

Trust IBM to come up with such a delightfully complicated yet reliable design.

[mbynum]

I used to service and repair this typewriter for IBM years ago. It is a complex machine. Well Done instructional video.

[phoenixtypewriter]

We still Clean, Service, Repair & Sell these IBM Selectrics in 2019
I know exactly what's wrong with your broken Selectric
Long live the Typewriter

[ZanderLexx]

When I was 6 years old (1985) my dad took me to his boss office to show me something cool. They both were in a very good relation so they let me play with a typewriter like this while they were discussing busyness. I only played like 5-10 minutes typing silly stuff but I still remember the feel and sound of it. It was my fist time seeing a typewriter like that, I loved it so much. The next day there were three more machines and people working on all of them. It was so crazy loud. Nowadays we have it so easy. That's why I DO love so much the clicky keys. And OMG you left me out of breath when you were left out of breath :)) . PS : I wonder how expensive the repair would have been in the past.

[LenHopkins]

Oh man, I used to have one of these! A friend borrowed it 25+ years ago. Still waiting for them to return it.

[freibier]

That typewriter has a really timeless, beautiful design. It still looks modern now.

[pamdemonia]

My stepmother has a Selectric II which she still uses all the time as she can type at 140+wps WHILE DOING SOMETHING ELSE! Not just typing up something pre-written either, I'm talking about say, writing a personal letter while talking on the phone. One of the most amazing things I've ever seen. She should have been a drummer. Anyway, as an old, I got to use one of these at a job and it is, in my opinion, the typing experience I have been chasing ever since!

[terrytaylor]

Great video. I worked for IBM US in the Office Products Division servicing these (and many other products). We also had a product in the late 70's called the Office System/6. It was one of the first systems to use a CRT display and it had a MASSIVE inkjet printer. The keyboard for the OS6 was a Selectric keyboard, complete to a cycle clutch and motor, so that it sounded and felt just like a Selectric.

Someone below also mentioned the Soviet (suspected) ability to read what was being type on a Selectric by monitoring the power fluctuations. We had a kit (Tempest certified) to solve that. It involved a heavy flywheel on a new motor (capacitor start, because of the load) and a noise filter. Installed several of those kits, as I had some defense customers.

You mention also, 4 tilt positions and 22 rotate, for 88 characters, but the typewriter that you are showing is a Selectric III, which had 96 characters (note the yellow printer on the type element cap.

[riflemanma]

How in God's green ass did some engineer come up with this design? It's ingenious.

[HandFromCoffin]

This is burned into my memory of grade school! Being sent to the principals office you'd sit in the secretarys room waiting your fate. She'd sit there and pound away on a beige IBM selectric. Just hearing you type on this thing brings it all flooding back.

[andriypredmyrskyy]

I just want you to know that videos like this are important. Without knowledge like this we are bound to eventually forget the specifics of advances previously made, and forget how ingenious all the inventions of old really are.
Thank you for this, I feel like I've learned a lot :)

[yeahrightbear]

It is absolutely incredible to think that someone designed this. Like this was in someone's head, and they built it, and it works. Makes me wonder what I'm doing with my life.

[Anamnesis]

My parents had one of the Selectric II units in Marlin Blue from the mid-1970s for use in their business, with the ANSI keyboard layout. They were the original owners and kept it for over three decades, continuing to use it to fill out forms that couldn't be filled via computer well into the 2000s. I know there was a whole repair industry dedicated to them, but in my experience that monster was as reliable as a wood burning stove, operating flawlessly the whole time. I remember being amazed by its heft and awestruck by the mechanical wizardry going on there even as a young kid. It must have weighed forty pounds and moving it felt like lifting an anvil. Using it was like witnessing the last vestiges of the old mechanical world before the entry of word processing in the new digital world. Turning it on was like switching an electrical disconnect, and I felt like Dr. Frankenstein throwing a giant breaker as it would roar to life and hum away at idle like an electric dynamo.

[SirNarax]

Engineering art. We did definitely lose something in our collective technological advancement. It is good to see people are willing to preserve and maintain such a device. It is good that you are willing to document the device. Who knows how long these will last but at least they are less likely to be forgotten.

[tonychesser]

Yes, I can imagine a room full of people typing on these. When I took typing class in high school, there was an entire room full of Selectric I and II typewriters, none of them having the correction functionality that yours has, with students banging away on all of them (I wanna say at least 24 going at once). And yes, it was every bit as noisy as you can imagine.

And those, IIRC, typed on 3 rows on the typewriter ribbon, helping to make that carbon ribbon last as long as possible.

This video has the best explanation of the whiffletree mechanism that I've ever seen. Suffice to say it was fiendishly complex; props to those understood it well enough to be able to repair one. Such folks are few and far between, anymore.

[eaglekepr]

30-years later I can still remember the key feel while learning to type on one of these. And the deafening clack of 15 others in a concrete-walled classroom with no sound deadening.

[VivaLaRazsa]

Working in a office full of typewriters would stop all that pointless smaltalk :D

[reko]

I'm learning to service these babies at an apprenticeship and I've only been there for two days! But you definitely made me even more excited to go back tomorrow, it was so cool to actually understand a lot of what you were explaining!