Hello, here is my IBM Selectric II typewriter, otherwise known as the golf ball
typewriter. This is the one is from 1973, the real deal, entirely mechanical. There's
not one bit of electronics in it, and it has the oh-so-useful correcting feature
with special correcting key. That unit did need a little bit of repair
which I chronicled in another video. OK, it's all repaired, and now that you have seeing how
insanely complicated it is inside you might wonder how the hell did someone go through the
complication of making a ball mechanism like this with two character
per inch settings, I have two scales here with 10 and 12 characters per inch. And
thousands and thousands of mechanical parts to make this work. And of course, it is because you have a nice
collection of balls like this and you want to change fonts. So lets see how this works.
This is Orator. I like it for making titles.
It makes giant letters.
And here is another one that's all caps, that makes nice subtitles, called Manifold.
And then I have a whole bunch of regular text ones.
A collection of "Elite", 12 character per inch.
NIce, very crisp light font.
That one is a little bolder. It's my favorite everyday font.
Then I have a 10 character per inch version of Elite.
Of course there is the one that made it to your computer.
And that is of course the Courier font.
And we have a whole series of nice artsy fonts
A cursive font with letters attached
And if you want italics you use this one.
And then I have a sans-serif font called Gothic
similar to Helvetica
Oops, let's make a correction...
And then I have the most fun font of all,
it's called Symbol. It's the Zapf-Dingbats for IBM.
I tell you, who needs a word processor when you have an IBM Selectric!