Rick's blog - Thursday 10th July 2025

Hello and welcome to Rick's blog Retro Edition!

As you can see, I got that old typewriter working, oiled, and a nice new ribbon. As always, the hard part is figuring out what to write about. Sometimes this is easy an item in the news, something that happened to me, or maybe something that I have been geeking out on.

But other times, not so easy. I suppose I could talk about how a typewriter actually works, but then these machines are actually remarkably simple. When you hit a key (and make no mistake, this requires FORCE so if you're used to those silly laptop keys that barely move, or worse, tapping a piece of glass, this will be an entirely alien experience) there is a linkage between the key and one of the hammers that rise up to whack into the ink ribbon, thus depositing ink onto the paper in the shape of whatever was on the hammer...which surprisingly enough corresponds to what is printed on the key. 

There are actually two imprints on the hammer. When used normally, you will be striking the lower imprint. However by pressing the Shift key, the entire carriage will shift upwards (and that's why it is called a Shift key) in order to strike using the upper imprint. This gives access to CAPITAL LETTERS and various symbols like @ and &. Because this typewriter is intended for office use, you have symbols like quarter, half, three quarters, a third, and a midline dot - and that last one is not a full stop with the carriage rotated a half line, it is a decimal point. Oddly enough there is no exclamation mark! No, really! What I did there was to type an apostrophe and then backspace, and finally a full stop '.=!

At least I have a 1 and a 0. I had a typewriter a long time ago that had neither. It was a lowercase l used as a one, and an upper case O used as a zero.  You can see on this typewriter that there is a difference between 1 and l, but I am not so sure about 0 and O. Zero is supposed to be narrower, but they look alike to me: 0O0O. As an office machine, there is only a need for (regular brackets), nothing fruity like square brackets or braces, which means that this typewriter would not be ideal for writing C or PHP or any of the curly bracket languages.
BASIC, on the other hand... :-)

The final thing is the colour selector. When you press a key, not only does the associated hammer move, the ink ribbon holder moved up, a little for black, and more for red. This allows for two ink colours on a page, though - again - as an office machine, red was probably intended for writing negative numbers, like your outstanding balance is -£EffAll.00 or the like.

And there you go. Starting with a blank page, now filled with some random musings about typewriters.  As far as I am aware, I have only made one mistake - a missing space - because there is no autocorrect or editing. Back in the day, fixing errors involved applying dabs of white paint-like stuff using something not unlike a nail polish applicator.

There is some smudging and irregularity, but to be honest I think that this is part of the charm of mechanotech - each letter strike may be just a teeny tiny bit different compared to the others. Indeed, I think these differences used to be a type of variation that would be useful in forensics - namely did this random note come from this typewriter?

Well, that's all for today.


Be seeing you.


https://heyrick.eu/blog/entry/20250710