this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Mechanical Keyboards
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I meant quiet compared to when the ball printed your line. I guess I should have specified that I was talking about the ones with the little LCD screen that would take all your text and then print it all at once.
(I'm pretty sure they were Selectrics, anyway. IBM for sure. They're what I learned to type on in school back in the dark ages. We weren't allowed to use that feature, but there's always someone that doesn't follow directions so we go to hear what it sounds like.)
I don't believe that they would be Selectrics. Those were essentially big hunks of electromechanical steel/cast iron, and would have lacked the componentry to drive and run an LCD screen, since they didn't have any transistorised electronics at all.
Since the keyboard was mechanical, there would be no easy way for a computer to interpret the input.
From the sounds of it, what you learned on might have been some form of word processor or teletype.
It wasn't a teletype. They were definitely IBM typewriters. They had a little LCD display on them and - if set to the right mode - would display the keys you typed and allow you to make corrections before you hit return (not sure on the name of the return/enter key), which would fire the daisy wheel to type out the line you entered. In regular mode (what we used it in, since it was a keyboarding class after all) it acted like a regular typewriter and typed one letter at a time.
I don't know how old they were. That class was, oh, around 1991 or 1992 I think? They weren't new, and were halfway through the process of being replaced. Half the class was full of 286 computers with typing software on them. We'd trade seats every week between the typewriters and PCs. I assume once the budget allowed they replaced the rest of them, but that would have been after my time.
There were Selectric models that had a built-in memory and supported various word processor functions, but nothing in the Wikipedia article jumped out at me. It might have been a non-Selectric (the memory plays tricks after 30 years), but it was definitely an IBM.
It was probably a Wheelwriter that you remember: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Wheelwriter
Yeah, I saw that. My brain keeps telling me Selectric though. I'll never know for sure - Mrs. Tipton^1^ (my typing teacher) retired the year after she taught me. I'm sure she's long dead by now.
Either way, they were cool and I loved typing on them.
^1^ I grew up in rural white Oklahoma. Mrs. Tipton was my first encounter with an old black lady. We loved her to death, because she took no shit. My favorite memory of her was when one of the kids was switching a typewriter on and off over and over again and she yelled out, "stop masturbating the typewriter!" Peak humor in the 1990s bible belt.