New video! A look at a word-processing typewriter

I enjoyed the video. Don't take this the wrong way, but personally speaking I preferred the more polished scripted method. But I get this was just a quicky, and very good all things considered. I sound really snobby don't I? Sorry, I don't mean to! :-)

That was fine, Alec. Interesting, too. I remember those, but never tried one.

My grandma had a Smith Corona typewriter from the 1980s that had WordErrase. Don't remember LineErase though. It had a demo mode that would do a q&a via the typewritten page and prompt you to enter questions and then continue by printing more stuff. No screen though. I had a Canon word processor (no typewriter mode) in the early 1990s (maybe 93? I think I was in the 7th or 8th grade). I had it at school due to a disability causing me to take much longer to write by hand and as things got more complicated, the school bought a word processor for me to use in class. It was a Canon and had some kind of a tape-based printer (maybe thermal? same stuff as a Brother label maker). It saved out ASCII text files and I had a plastic box of floppies in my book bag and I'd carry it from class to class. I'd load in a piece of notebook paper and hit print and it'd print right there in the classroom. They finally bought me a battery before high school so I was not chained to a power plug anymore.

The first computer "printer' I had was an Olympia wheel-writer typewriter with an RS232 port. Connected to my IBM PC-XT (the one with - gasp - two 5-1/4" floppy drives and a 486 processor plus a color VGA monitor) and the Olympia would serve as a printer. One character at a time, one line at a time, one sheet at a time. This was in the late 1980s. Woo hoo! Hot stuff!

People who were not around in the 80's or early 90's have no conception of just how expensive computers were, back in the day - It wasn't uncommon for a nice PC to be $2995 in the 80's, now figure that up in 1980's dollars adjusted for inflation (perhaps $7000) - like the price of a nice used car! - It's no wonder these little word processor typewriters were popular! - and it was like a miracle to produce a document with no ugly white out fluid or correction tape overstrike mess. It made your work look very professional!