HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

One of the interesting things about the Selectric is that it contains a mechanical digital-to-analog converter .. a Whiffletree mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

A distributed system will never be as intuitive as MS Word, which is basically the digitized version of stone tables, or papyrus, or whatever thousands of years old thing we are already familiar with.

Or just remain a bit more strict and look at typewriters. Word is a typewriter. People look at typewriters and sort of understand them after pushing one-two buttons. Yes, there are hidden gems and details and a long road from mechanical typewriters to Word and laser printers (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw ), but people are a lot more intuitive about these pieces of hardware and software, because they are simply updates on existing tech.

Distributed systems is a new, and hitherto an explicitly unknown concept for many people.

And with minikube you can set up k8s as easily as MS Office. (Or you can use Typhoon https://typhoon.psdn.io .. )

And it's trivial to package up all this into a website, like Office 365 and GKE https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/ .

Or you can run it on your own PC with minikube and Virtualbox/KVM/qemu, and similarly you can install Office locally. But it does not make sense for one and it increasingly makes less for the other too.

As in, were they fast enough to be used with other layouts? Yeah, but this was back when letters were dictated- secretaries didn't go switching to dvorak. Any typewriter could technically use any layout, since you'd just have to swap out the characters.

The biggest advantage of the selectric was that you could swap out the ball to get different characters or fonts. The ability to get italics was a pretty big deal.

Here's Bill Hammond talking about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

⬐ pbtflakes

The appendix to this video [0] goes into the specific operation of the Whiffletree mechanism.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_SC7oWL78A

You may enjoy Bill Hammack's video "IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

⬐ Animats

The IBM Selectric is a magnificent piece of engineering, and close to being the last complex piece of mass-manufactured mechanical logic . The only electrical part is a motor.

But it's not the ancestor of the computer printer.

The Selectric's main ancestor is the Blickensderfer_typewriter [1], from 1892. This used a curved type element rather than a typeball, but had a similar method of turning key presses into typing element positions. As with the Selectric, the font could easily be changed. There was a proportional-spacing successor to the Blickensderfer, the Vari-Typer, and IBM imitated that, too, with the IBM Selectric Composer.

The Selectric had a moving print head rather than moving paper, with cables on moving idlers used to transmit position to the print head. That mechanism is from the Teletype Model 28/35, from the early 1950s. Moving the print head rather than the paper was a Teletype concept - it worked much better with roll paper, and the machine was narrower.

The Selectric mechanism was not designed for electrical inputs and outputs. The add-on mechanism for that was an afterthought, and kind of a hack. The unit had to be built into a table, and the mechanism for the keyboard extended below the tabletop. IBM and Remington had previously built typewriters with electrical I/O, and those were used with some early mainframe computers.

Many computers, before and after the Selectric, used Teletype machines as I/O devices. That lasted until daisy-wheel printers and cheap CRT terminals were invented.

(Mechanical line printers have a completely separate history. They descend from the Potter Flying Typewriter.[2])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blickensderfer_typewriter [2] https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1952/5041/00...

⬐ dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8559368