Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[harrypothead]

THE MAGIC SELECTRIC

In these latter days of personal computers, laser jet printers, and all of the other electronic paraphernalia that has made Bill Gates disgustingly rich it is hard to realize the primitive state of typography in the antiquity of the 1970's.

Your old fashioned typewriter only had one font. IBM, however, had come out with the selectric typewriter which had a removable bouncing ball. You could remove the ball and replace it with another one having a different font. I acquired one of these magic typewriters and got several fonts, thus becoming a fanzine editor with a greater than usual number of balls.

This meant that PB had multiple fonts - generally the choices were courier for ordinary text and italics for editorial comments.

http://www.nesfa.org/History/HarterPB.htm

You're right about the Selectric. My parents had one it the last half of the 70's. The Selectric revolutionized typesetting. Newspapers used the Selectric for blocking, and multiple fonts were available. In what year was the Selectric typewriter first introduced?