The IBM Selectric was an immensely popular typewriter that was initially released in 1961, and it's thought to have been

such a success, in part because of its design, it looks quite beautiful, to my eye, at least, and in part

because it did away with the traditional basket of type bars that would swing up when you pressed a key,

each type bar with a letter or other character at the end,

applying ink to paper, and this typewriter replaced that setup with what's called a typing

element, sometimes called a type ball or a golf ball, because it looks like a little golf ball-sized

object, covered in convex letters, numbers, and other common symbols.

This change in how the letters were applied to the page made the typewriter overall

less prone to mechanical issues, and it also allowed for the relatively simple changing

of fonts. You could pull the little ball out of the typewriter, swap in a new one,

covered in bold type or italics,

or Hebrew characters, or whatever else, and then go about typing as you were before,

different lettering made available without requiring an entirely new device.

Upgrades were made to this basic model over the course of the next few decades with the Selectric 2,

introducing new spacing and layout options, and the correcting Selectric 2, containing two types

of what was called correcting tape, one that was close to what we today might call whiteout,

so you could type, make a mistake, and then type over that mistake

with correction fluid covering it up, and another that was called lift tape, which would be

applied over letters that you just typed, and then pulled off, lifting most of the ink off

with it. Throughout the 60s, magnetic tape versions of the Selectric were released alongside their completely analog kin,

which allowed users to interface their typewriters with early computers and other magnetic storage devices.

In essence, this made these typewriters into a kind of proto-word processor,

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