Today's Lesson

IBM Selectric II

The Selectric typewriter was first released in 1961 and is generally considered to be a design classic. After the Selectric II was introduced a few years later, the original design was designated the Selectric I. The Correcting Selectric II differed from the Selectric I in many respects:

The Selectric II was squarer at the corners, whereas the Selectric I was rounder.
The Selectric II had a Dual Pitch option to allow it to be switched (with a lever at the top left of the "carriage") between 10 and 12 characters per inch, whereas the Selectric I had one fixed "pitch".
The Selectric II had a lever (at the top left of the "carriage") that allowed characters to be shifted up to a half space to the left (for inserting a word one character longer or shorter in place of a deleted mistake), whereas the Selectric I did not.

The Selectric II had optional auto-correction (with the extra key at the bottom right of the keyboard), whereas the Selectric I did not. (The white correction tape was at the left of the typeball and its orange take-up spool at the right of the typeball.)

The Selectric II had a lever (above the right platen knob) that would allow the platen to be turned freely but return to the same vertical line (for inserting such symbols as subscripts and superscripts), whereas the Selectric I did not.

Both Selectric I and Selectric II were available in standard, medium, and wide-carriage models and in various colors, including red and blue as well as traditional neutral colors, and both used the same typeballs, which were available in many fonts, including symbols for science and mathematics, OCR faces for scanning by computers, script, Old English, and more than a dozen ordinary alphabets. The typeballs came in two styles: Original models had a metal spring clip with two wire wings that squeezed together, later models had a fragile flip-up black plastic lever that could break off, which was later redesigned to have a substantial plastic lever that did not break. Over the years, there were several different styles for the ribbons, even in the same model Selectric, and they were not interchangeable. Selectric I models used either a cloth cartridge ribbon or a spool film ribbon. Correcting Selectic II models had a cartridge film ribbon instead of the spool style, although the non-correcting models used the earlier cloth cartridge. LINK

Keep in mind that the White House released the Killian documents without question. And why hasn't anyone bothered to find the trusted clerk who typed documents for Killian during the time period in question? Howard K. Smith, where are you when we need you?

Thus endeth today's lesson.