The correcting feature of typewriters is not what I thought

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:
clip-share.net/video/bRCNenhcvpw/video.html

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.

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.

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

Omg that first 30 seconds describes my video creation process exactly.

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

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

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

That bit about period + apostrophe being used to create an exclamation mark actually explains why sometimes the mark on older typed documents (often seen in films) looked like it was italicized!

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.

As you mentioned, the QWERTY layout was created for typewriters. Once I learned it's inefficient, I switched to Dvorak. But then I had to use other computers too many times that didn't have Dvorak set up so I relearned QWERTY just so I can type both and I can switch back and forth effortlessly. The brain is magical.

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.

That was once again an interesting episode! It was actually quite interesting how much the mechanical keyboard influenced our modern keyboard. The "Shift" keys make sense, now!

"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.

Hearing this and seeing old typewriters with their margin settings, makes me feel like younger generation seeing floppies and recognizing them only as “3D printed” save icons

I didn't see it mentioned in comments so apologies if it already is. In the 70's my typewriter had black and red ribbon. It was the laptop version of a type writer that was slimmed down to fit in a brief case. Then in the 80's they sold ribbon that was black and white. Black ink and white out! With the correction ribbon right on the type ribbon I could get BLAZING speeds and top notch looking pages even though I flub at least twice a line! Really cool walk back to the selectric era of typing. Yes, they were AMAZING!

I got an old typewriter from my grandma that I absolutely adore. Because it’s old (older than the one used in this video), some keys do get stuck, but I really love it because of the old vibe of it. It also didn’t have that correcting feature built into it, so my dad later gave me white out tape that you’d put underneath the key and type over the letter. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I got it as a kid. But wow, the model shown in the video and it’s corrections is seriously incredible!

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!

I remember using my typewriter to write school papers in the late 90s. the family had recently acquired our first computer/printer already, but I’d just _blasted_ the ink cartridge by printing out way too many (wildly inaccurate) guitar tabs. so the typewriter maintained its usefulness for some time after haha

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...

I am really grateful for you to producing this video. I feel like i learned a part of my history today. My maternal grandfather and family used to run a typewriting institute which got bankrupted by the computer revolution. My paternal grandfather worked in an Estate as a typist for 40 years or so and has a mechanical basket typewriter that i intend to adopt afyer his time and have it repaired as a family heirloom. Both my mother and uncle entered the banking career as stenographer before getting promoted to clerks and so on. So i am grateful that i learned something today

As someone who has tried restoring an old selectric, I am impressed by whoever aligned the tilt and rotate on that selectric. Mine are ever so slightly off

I learned to type on a typewriter in the late 80's early 90's I remember when we got the "correcting" typewriters to the consternation of our typing teacher who employed the T-shirt over the keyboard method of touch typing instruction. He quit when they wanted to install computers in his classroom in the early 90's. I can still touch type at a decent wpm, I'd make a decent 60's secretary. My grandma even had an old school typewriter I could type too fast to use without slowing down 🙂

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.

We had one of those automatic ones in my elementary school! We loved to play around with it, especially the erasing feature - type out a long word, hit the button, and watch it magically stamp it away, letter by letter. Eventually the teacher had to stop us since we were going through the sticky erasure tape so fast!

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.

I learned from hard experience with PC's to use labels for addressing envelopes! I am from the typewriter generation; my typing classes were in the late 1950's. I still have a portable Royal manual typewriter from about 1945. On my job, I had an IBM Selectric III which was a wonderful typewriter. Unfortunately, it was notorious for problems! All those little niceties were prone to trouble.

I found typewriters fascinating as a child, and still do as an adult.
I always wondered about how the presumably complicated mechanics worked (I only knew the arms/basket type back then).
Seeing, and trying out the erase function the first time struck me with awe in late Kindergarten, or so.

This is fascinating. I never knew typewriters had correction mechanisms. I always thought that once you made a mistake, there was no turning back. That modern typewriter's correction looks awesome. You can't even tell if there was a mistake on the paper that got removed.

My grandfather was a typewriter mechanic and I ended up in a PC Support career for a number of years. In high school, in the 70’s, I took typing with the sole purpose of meeting girls. In the end, it was full of other guys with the same modus operandi. I ended up becoming a very fast typist at a time when most guys had never touched a typewriter. It turned out to be a very good skill as personal computers make their appearance in the early 80’s. Especially being a support person. Just about everything you explained touched a memory of how life was different with typewriters. Even using a lowercase l rather than the missing 1 key.

I used to repair IBM Selectric typewriters. I loved them, especially when you tear them apart and see exactly how they work to translate the key press into an exact 4 dimensional position for the type ball.
Getting them adjusted after replacing a broken rotate or tilt tape, or other repairs, was always lots of fun lol

"The only thing better than perfect is standardized" this is worthy of a Nobel prize!

I remember growing up in the 80's and seeing and using both manual and electric typewriters. Highly mechanical devices still fascinate me today.

My dad had an electornic typewriter and for 30 years I've wondered what the heck that triple sound I heard when hitting the delete key was. Glad that's one more mystery solved.

I would definitely watch more about the typewriters! I never knew that there were two types of that ribbon, and now I'm very curious about typing conventions you mentioned briefly.

Thanks as always for the video! It's always fun for me to walk down memory lane with typewriters.
In case anyone didn't know and was curious to check it out, the IBM Selectric ribbons keeping a record of every character typed is (Spoiler Alert!) a major plot point in the Columbo episode "Now You See Him..." (1976): Having recently watched that one, it's a lot of fun to see an in-depth technical discussion on why and how Stefan Mueller messed up so badly!😄

I always manage to watch your videos for way longer without the impatience that I would have with other videos of even half the length. Very informative and engaging!

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")

By the time I was a child typewriters were completely replaced by computers, but my kindergarten had a couple old, old ones that I loved to play with. This is fascinating stuff, I didn't know most of it!

I would definitely like a followup video on typewriters and their conventions that we still use!

Great episode. I learned to type in the 50s on a massive manual before moving on to electrics (first with a manual return and then fully electric) until breaking through to computers. It's been quite a ride.

Even before correction tapes, they made correction slips which were the same idea but on rectangles about 1''x2''. You would have to manually slide the slip inbetween the paper and the printhead, use backspace and manually retype. It was a little bit of a pain, but it was far better than the older method with liquid wite-out, which involved spooling up the paper, getting the bottle out, dipping and wiping the brush, dabbing it onto the bad word (usually very sloppily and difficult to do cleanly - a typist who could do this well was a god among typists) and waiting for it to dry before spooling the paper back down and typing over the hopefully-dry mistake. (Oh, also, with the correction slips, you had to be sure to put them in the right way, or else you'd just get wite out on the ribbon and nothing would happen to the text on the paper.)

In '77 (when I was 17 and commodity printers and computers were a long way from being a thing), I was mucking about with microprocessors (SCMP and 2650).
I managed to score an old Selectric typewriter and dug about its insides, figuring out the mechanism.
I built an interface so I could use it as a printer (although by the time it was working I was at uni and better computers were available - so it ended up gathering dust).
Those typewriters were such an amazing piece of machinery.

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!

The Selectronic is such a marvellous piece of engineering! I wish I had use for one.

I'm old enough that I had a fully electric Smith Corona typewriter in high school. It had the automatic correcting feature you demonstrated, which fascinated me too. It could auto correct a letter, a word, or even an entire line of text. And although it was an English typewriter, it had the feature you mentioned where you could hit a key so that the carriage wouldn't move, so you could apply accent marks or the like to letters. One thing I remember about the auto correct feature is just how hard the little "hammers" (that's what I called the type thingies) would hit the page, and yes, each one would hit multiple times in rapid succession. So hard that I had to get a different desk, because the original lightweight table I used as a desk would actually jump when the typewriter did its auto correct thing. Personal computers were a thing when I was in high school, but at that point they were still quite expensive. Like $1100-$1500 for a computer that would let you just do basic word processing, plus a printer to print everything out. And that was in the 1990s, so with inflation that's probably 2 to 3k in today's money. My family didn't have that kind of money, so the typewriter was a gift from my parents. I think it was about $250, so not super cheap, but nowhere near the expense of a computer. I took it to college with me, but the entire dorm hated it because it made so much noise. Then I found out my school would facilitate helping you take out an extra loan for a computer if you wanted one, so that's what I did. I think I ended up selling the typewriter at a garage sale.

PLEASE make more videos on typewriters and the trivia and history of them!! Absolutely fascinating stuff :D

Just wanted to say that daisy wheel typing doesn't have to be electronic. Daisy wheels were a common implementation for teleprinters, back when they were almost entirely mechanic (except for the receive magnet). There used to be one of those nice 1940s info reels on Clip-Share about how it worked in mechanical detail, but that seems to have disappeared since I last saw it.
Never forget to download Clip-Share videos that might matter!

this is indeed fascinating. didn't think this was possible at all in the way it actually works.

I would love both the concise "get to the point" version of these videos as well as the 5 hour long "lost in the sauce" versions as well. Both levels of immersion for these topics are ideal!

These sounds take me back... I learned to type on a typewriter when I was a kid - or more accurately, taught myself to type, using a book. It blows my mind how I managed to learn anything like that, when nowadays whenever I need to learn something new, I look for a video 😄

I found an Underwood Champion (I believe it's from the 1930's) that works relatively well (some of the keys stick and the ribbon needs adjusting somehow, not sure how this works yet) and I've been SO excited to use it. I'm fairly certain it does not have the feature represented as the main topic here, but this video is teaching me things about my typewriter that I was honestly worried I'd never learn simply because I didn't know where to look for "typewriter manuals", and because the ones I did find were for much later models. I sincerely appreciate you for uploading this, I'm learning about my typewriter through referencing the points of the ones shown in the video, and I'm really intrigued by the different evolutions of these machines and the eventual electronic implementations. Thank you.
Also, I too remember the days of carbon copies- that term hasn't crossed my mind in over 15 years, that was a blast from the past. I was fascinated by that as a kid. It was like "live copy/paste" at the lift of a page.

My grandpa had a really old type writer that I used to play with as a kid. It was probably antique by the time I was using it but I remember it being clunky and annoying to use but the sound it made when typing was really satisfying. I think it might have an influence on me liking the computer keyboards that are noisy and have thick keys instead of the thinner, compact ones many laptops come with.

I always thought typewriters used a whiteout-type of solution to correct mistakes. This was very fascinating! Thank you!

Very interesting video! Although I wasn't born early enough to have typewriters still regularly around, I still like to type on them to this day, and actually have both an old-style, mechanic one with a ribbon made out of cloth, and a newer, electric (electronic) one with correction tape contained inside the cartridge.
And to answer your question; yes, I'd really like a video on more extensive typewriter trivia.

I'm old enough to remember using both a manual, Selectric, and Daisy Wheel printer. Did you know that there were some printers that used a daisy wheel. To make those daisy wheels last longer, the letters were actually metal. I have seen a daisy wheel printer throw a metal letter into the ceiling. This was a great walk back to memory lane.

I love the sound of a bunch of typewriters in a room, people tapping away, and carriages being pushed back to the right.
Reminds me of typing class in high school. Even though it was 2006, our teacher (who was like 65 at the time and always smelled of a freshly smoked cigarette ) found it very important for us to use a typewriter instead of a PC. We used models that had been in the school since the late 70s.
I didn’t mind as I had used them before, but that was probably my strictest class with our posture being constantly corrected by the teacher, her constantly hovering over us to make sure we had our hands resting correctly on the keys, and often was graded by how many words per minute we’d put onto paper.
Thank goodness our class was on the third floor all the way to the back end of the school, because it would get loud in there lol. I enjoyed it.
Can’t say I’ve really used a typewriter all that much since, but I still find myself making sure my hands are positioned correctly and I sit upright when I am typing something out on my PC that is longer than a few sentences lol.

One really interesting thing about these typewriters is just how much of their features carried over sometimes correctly i remember when Word had this those little tabs specifically for the margin as well as many other features.

The Slovak mechanical typewriter did not have the "1" symbol and yes, we used lowercase "l" instead. Also, there were two colored typewriters with a thicker ribbon, divided horizontally, one part was red, other was black. I cannot remember which was top and which bottom.

It is really interesting, how certain control characters, specifically those for new lines, were named after the typewriter analogy - namely Carriage Return and Line Feed. While windows is looking for both of these characters in Textfiles, Unixoids are fine with just line feed.
Great video. Now I know how Typewriters can undo typos and why adhesive tapes can destroy toner printed labels.

I am always amazed by the ingenuity of mechanical solutions to problems.

This was insanely interesting! To be honest, whenever you returned from a tangent I felt a little bit sad, I'd watch an hour of in-depth video on obsolete writing machines without a doubt!

Your fascinating explanation style is next to none. Its a joy to watch - even as a old fellow who grew up with that kind of machines - including the IBM analog / digital crossover typewriter. And yes, I also believed the IBM would simply type white letters over the black mistaken ones - because white correction cards with white vinyl, to be held by hand between the hammer and the paper, were common for standard typewriters. Oh, and I loved the white correction ink for painting rectangles on my school books to put my name on a state of the art background.
By the way - in those days (around 1980) there was a small copier, that didn't use the Xerographic system (something with extremely high force drums maybe?), that let you choose parts of the original to be left out in multiple rectangular shapes (with a stylus on plastic on the lid) and choose from different colors like, black, white, red, blue, silver, gold to be put on paper or sticky tranparent foil or standard foil. Oh how much would i like to even have a clue by which company that was made.

Your videos answer the questions I have in life! I've wondered about this subject before but never at a convenient time that I could research it. Thanks!

I am an old long toothed retired technician. I have serviced the old type-arm versions, type-ball versions, as well as the daisy-wheel versions. Your video brought back many many memories, some not so fond,lol! In any case, that was mostly in the 70s. In the 80s I started working on the dedicated Word Processor machines such as Micom and Wang. As time progressed I worked on terminal systems, particularly in the large Canadian banking networks. Then into the 90s, my work was mainly on PCs. In the 2000s it evolved into high end networked PCs, tablets and smartphones. In my 40+ year career as an electronic technologist I witnessed the evolution of IT that today boggles my mind much more than the simple user. Moores Law is alive and well 😉

I feel like the staggered key arrangement actually helps a lot with my muscle memory for which row i'm typing on. -like how old blackberry phones helped me hit the right letter instead of accidentally mashing about 3 of them or the neighboring one with my fat thumb on a touch screen-
I wish old PDA style phones still had a large enough niche, as fun and energy gluttonous as smart phones are, every once in a while i'd miss the simple things seeing them again in channels like this.

My original thought about how this worked was that it was using some sort of chemical reaction to "burn" off the letters. This was much more interesting, and a lot more simple, but also a lot more complicated than I thought.

I love this kind of deep dives into “every day” things. I look forward to your 2 hour long video essay on typewriters!

I remember my dad's secretary had one of the older type and she used small rectangular pieces of paper with white ink (manufactured for the purpose) to erase. Don't remember specifics but she would backtrack, place the white paper right where the key should strike and press the key. I may be only imagining this but I'm pretty sure it really was like that...

Would love futher videos in this area! This is super interesting. One thing I noticed that I didn't realize before is that the margin control sliders in Word are triangles because that's the shape of the sliders on the typewriter :)

For those that didn't know, the typewriter is the reason why on Windows systems, a line-ending is "carriage return" and "line feed", in sequence. The carriage return brings your cursor to the left, the line feed "feeds" the paper one line up. Some typewriters had that manually, but others had a special lever for that as well.

I completely forgot I used my Grandma's old type writer in my childhood to write short stories and type reports for school, to the point the thought probably hasn't crossed my mind for most of my adult life. But when he pulled out that old fashioned typewriter with the type bar, I could immediately smell it through my memories. The ink, the machine oil, the paper fiber from decades of use that never got cleaned, not to mention the carrying case that had been absorbing the fumes from it all for probably decades before I was even born. It had a distinctive smell to it.

I saw that feature when it came out and I couldn't believe it, truly - it was magic! Excellent job - thanks for this!

"The paper is (stationery)"
Beautifully done, just the perfect amount of pause-and-look-into-the-camera afterwards.

I had one of those word processor / electronic typewriters he showed at the end, though I think just a bit more recent.
I always thought that white tape was a whiteout ribbon and the four fast taps were making sure it fully covered the letter.
I mean, that’s basically what it looked like, but it did actually work on colored paper and my eleven year old self in ‘93 didn’t notice.
So weird to see a video about the clunky thing I hated writing my earliest school reports on (because we were too poor to get a pc for a few more years)

My very first typewriter as a child was a Remington Portable I bought at an Erie JayCees (Junior Chamber of Commerce) rummage sale fundraiser. I have a ton of stuff still that I used this for. I tried to write my own _Three Investigators_ novel and typed out the first chapter. I made my own copy of Monopoly since the family one was kept in my parent's bedroom and only brought out on the holidays. I still have the typewriter but the ribbon needs re-inked.

Fascinating. Thank you for this video. I am of the same era, where I am old enough to witness typewriters, but young enough to enjoy computers lol. I never knew that was how typewriters corrected things. I also assumed it was correction fluid.

There was also a third erasing option for the "traditional" typewriters: there were white squares/rectangles that left a white mark when hit by a typing element. You had to go back and retype the same symbol while holding one of those between the tape and the sheet (or did this involved using the shift key somehow? I have a vague memory as I saw this as a child from my grandfather). Similar in principle to using a brush and the white paint, but leads to a much cleaner result.

I didn't think it possible for me to love a Selectric I, II or III any more, 'til viewing your most informative segment. As a long time fan, first time commentator, many thanks! -New York Nick

Back in, oh, 1974 or so, my father - a life-long "IBMer" - used his employee discount to purchase a Selectric II for my mother. Mom is a genealogist, and consequently did a great deal of typing. On an old Smith-Corona, very similar to the one displayed as an example of an "old school manual" typewriter.
I recall two things about this beast of a machine: First, it took some two years of monthly payments to pay it off, even with the discount - they were the equivalent of a couple grand in today's money - and second, it weighed about 50lbs. My mother used it for a couple decades, happily typing (and correcting) away on her hobby before my folks finally purchased their first PC and printer. At that point, I was offered the typewriter.
I took it, because it was friggin' cool, built like a tank, and did things my own ink-jet could never do. And I lugged that thing around from apartment to apartment for another 20 years before finally giving it away because I was tired of dealing with a piece of tech I very rarely used. As far as I know, it's probably still banging away out there somewhere in the wild - these things, as I mentioned, were built like tanks and would run pretty much forever.
Fun fact: There was an edge-connector buried inside, and with the right adapter you could control it with a computer for use as an excellent "impact printer".
I kind of wish I'd never gotten rid of it, these days... but not too much. 😋

Also of mention is that the QWERTY keyboard layout was to prevent the basket from jamming. Typing fast, you can have a second key coming up while the first one is going down, those "fingers" in the basket could jam if they weren't separated enough.

My family had one of those electronic typewriters. I vaguely remember using it to write some school papers before we got our first computer. We even used it for years after getting a computer to fill out forms.

It is fantastic to learn how this worked. I always thought it was a form of correction tape as well. My Grandmother has a very early typewriter. It had no marks on the keys. It was 'fun' to learn to type, oh and don't forget the mechanic nature of the basket made it easily jamded when typing to fast, like 20 words per minute.

This is absolutely fascinating, & I would love to see more about typewriters! Do a video with the rest of what you wrote, please! It's so dang interesting I just can't contain myself!
I used the backspace key several times when typing this, & it kind of saddens me that there's no tape involved.

Great episode! I remember a day I our Navy department office when the typist was having a hard time and we told her that in addition to the putting the ribbon cartridge in the safe at day’s end she should also put the correcting ribbon in with it. Strangely, she didn’t see the intended humor in the remark.

Fun programming fact: in ASCII, there are special non-type characters for both Carriage Return and New Line! This video has finally made it sink in why that is.
Some character environments require both to be present for a newline, some use them interchangeably, and others only use the newline character. This can cause wonky spacing to happen if you take a text document from one environment into a different one, typically by either gaining an extra newline in between every line, or losing all of your newlines and having everything on a single line.

8:40 This is still used today to make uppercase accented letters: You first type the accent [´] and then the letter [E] to make the accented letter [É] (for the lowercase there's usually a key for that but you can still do it like with the uppercase)

Thanks so much for this video ! I have been left astounded by this mechanism ! You absolutely need to release a really deep video on typewriters

My mom learned to type on a machine with a correction feature. In typing class they had assignments where they had to type a page in a set amount of time with making max. 2 mistakes. (going forward in the class that would change to 0 mistakes eventually) In order to control that, they had not only to turn in the page they typed but also the correction tape, so the teacher could control if they made more mistakes. Fun times.

I adore these videos, they make the curious part of me absolutely happy!
I haven't really used a typewriter much, at most for some retro vibes on a greeting card, but my mother owned two - one fully mechanical, in shiny red color. The force one had to use to type fast on that was a huge surprise for me. Then she had an electric one, this time normal US english layout. I don't remember any specifics about it, besides that it was a very basic model for its era.
When I was a small child, I used to love the old manual one for the click-clack sound and passionately hated the electric one, because when it moved, it sounded worse than an old scanner (same noise, but louder!).
I only know some of the old technologies thanks to local university and library, where the tech was usually not too fast to retire, meaning, during my childhood and early teens, I've seen needle printers for receipts (nowadays it's thermo), experienced sending documents via fax (awful quality!) and heard the tones of dial-up internet before it went extinct. Total contrast to what I'm used to since my early teens, in terms of computers, internet speed and data in general.

I can't believe it took me this long to find this particular video of yours. I've long been fascinated by typewriters, and also have a collection of them. Mine are all manual ones, though. Only a couple really work right, though.

I always liked the feeling of slinging that carriage across the machine to the next line. It was like a reward for the accomplishment of typing another line on the paper without a mistake! BTW I have lived 62 years in this world of technology and have seen a lot of changes but your videos always teach me something fascinating and new. You help fulfill my quest to be a cesspool or trivial information!

Wow this took me back. Especially the Shift and ShiftLock part for some reason. Im not even that old, I was born in 1985, but I remember growing up playing with and typing on typrewriters. Probably at my Grandmother's house. She watched us after school a lot so I got to soak up a lot of that old people culture in the late 80s/early 90s 😊
I also remember thinking that typewriters with the backspace feature were the newer "nicer" ones even though they were old news by the time I was alive.
Your mention of actual carbon copies took me back too.
Neat stuff.

Being able to read the used ribbon was the crucial plot point on an episode of the TV show "Columbo." It allowed the detective to prove who was the murderer and the machine was rigged to allow the audience to read the text easier than usual.

When I went to college in the early '90's I had yet to even see a word processor. My friends were surprised to see me doing all the prep work English teachers go on about, like making outlines, before starting a paper. They were stunned at how little editing my papers required before turning them in. When out of order paragraphs require retyping entire pages you really try to get it right the first time. To be fair, once I started using word processing software it felt like cheating. Cut and paste takes the place of a lot of thought and planning.

I enjoyed this video a lot. I grew up to witness and somewhat experience more or less the full range of typewriters, so this was a trip down memory lane. I am quite certain that on some models the carriage return lever was customisable to deliver single, one and a half, or double line spacing. And the fun didn't stop there. Some also had a number of customisable tabulator stops in addition to the margin settings, and of course a "TAB" key to send the carriage forward to the next stop.

The most egregious aspect of the old mechanical typewriter output was that periods were often punched through the paper. When I was a boy, typists were cautioned to type periods and commas lightly to avoid that.

The VERY SUBTLE pun at 11:33 was amazing. “In this typewriter, the paper is stationary(/stationery)”. Very well done!! You’ve had my bell notification for a good while now and you don’t dissapoint!

Very interesting seeing where stuff originally came from. I never knew it was called shift because it literally shifted the part in the typewriter. Or literal caps lock. Technology is fascinating

The QUERTY layout is also, like the staggered keys from the typewriter era. This layout of keys prevented the type arms from jamming together when typing quickly. As we got so used to this layout it became the de facto standard (other layouts like DVORAK are avaible but not at all common) and thus, like the staggered keys still hangs on with modern day computer keyboards.