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My father was a typewriter repairman, and his specialty was fixing the Selectric. It was quite lucrative -- these things were expensive enough to be worth repa

by hardtke 14y ago

My father was a typewriter repairman, and his specialty was fixing the Selectric. It was quite lucrative -- these things were expensive enough to be worth repairing and were as important to companies as Internet is now. When I was 10, however, we were watching the Super Bowl and the infamous Apple 1984 advertisement came on TV. My dad immediately realized he was doomed. He went out and bought the Mac on the first day it was available. We brought it home. I plugged it in, turned it on, and my faster saw WYSIWYG for the first time in the text editor. The first words out of his mouth were "oh, shit." I went to print the document and it didn't work -- the initial batch of printer cables were incorrect. When we got the new printer cable from the store the next week, my dad decided to change professions and focused on real estate.

jff 14y ago
> I went to print the document and it didn't work Some things never change.
leoc 14y ago
What was the printer? It certainly wasn't producing letter-quality output.
- hardtke 14y ago
  It was the ImageWriter dot-matrix printer that was released around the same time as the original mac. The pins in the printer cable were in the wrong place.
- leejoramo 14y ago
  As I recall, the original ImageWriter printer was much better than the other dot matrix printers at the time largely due to the Mac software. The Mac Screen was 72DPI and the ImageWriter was 72DPI. This was real WYSIWYG. Additionally nearly all of the other dot matrix printing was done based on low quality build in fonts. Send some text to output with control codes and you got output. The Mac basically painted pixel on the printer, so what ever font or image you had on the screen was accurately rendered. Prior to the Mac/ImageWriter combination most of the letter quality (meaning good enough for business correspondence) printing I had seen was done via typewriters wired up to computers. Afterward, many businesses decided the Mac/ImageWriter was good enough for many purposes. Edit: oh, I forgot there were also Daisy Wheel printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printer
smackfu 14y ago
Wasn't the original Mac quite a bit more expensive than a Selectric? Seems interesting that he saw the potential.
- larrys 14y ago
  Similar - I was an early adopter of "desktop publishing". I was in the printing business and part of doing printing was doing typesetting. For that we had dedicated machines with terminals and large floppy drives which output on photographic paper which needed to be processed chemically. The first machine I bought (Itek) used light shining through a plastic font. Each font cost $40 (iirc) and for each variation (say, bold, once again iirc) you needed a different plastic piece. Anyway in along with the first mac a bit later came the laserwriter and customers started using that for camera ready copy (canarie in the coal mine was only 300dpi way below photographic quality). Later linotype built a rip that could interface a Mac 512k (iirc) with the linotype (about 1985). I spent almost 6 figures on a linotype and became a service bureau. The minute I saw that you could draw a box on a Mac around type (with traditional systems you needed to essentially program this) I knew what would happen. That said I was in my 20's most others in my business didn't see it the same way since they were older. Parent commenter - what was the age of your father at the time he had this revelation?
  - russell 14y ago
    My aunt was a linotype operator in the 1950s. One day I visited her at work and she typed my name into a slug. The machine was amazing. It was something like 8 feet tall, maybe more, with a gazillion moving parts. Typing was fairly slow compared to a typewriter, but every time a letter was pressed, I could hear the cast being selected and moving down to its place in the line. Finally she pressed a lever and the line went off to be case in lead. A few seconds (cant remember the speed) later the lead slug with my name on it appeared.
    - larrys 14y ago
      Your comment then forked me to find (on linkedin) the salesman who sold me that machine. Of all things he now works at Kodak it seems. I remember those hot type machines never owned one it was before my time. Someone could probably make a novelty linotype app duplicating the process and the noise the machine made.
acheron 14y ago
My parents tell me that when I was young I said I wanted to be a typewriter repairman when I grew up. Unfortunately I was born in 1982, probably at least 30 years too late for that.

by hardtke 14y ago

jff 14y ago

> I went to print the document and it didn't work Some things never change.

leoc 14y ago

What was the printer? It certainly wasn't producing letter-quality output.

hardtke 14y ago
It was the ImageWriter dot-matrix printer that was released around the same time as the original mac. The pins in the printer cable were in the wrong place.
leejoramo 14y ago
As I recall, the original ImageWriter printer was much better than the other dot matrix printers at the time largely due to the Mac software. The Mac Screen was 72DPI and the ImageWriter was 72DPI. This was real WYSIWYG. Additionally nearly all of the other dot matrix printing was done based on low quality build in fonts. Send some text to output with control codes and you got output. The Mac basically painted pixel on the printer, so what ever font or image you had on the screen was accurately rendered. Prior to the Mac/ImageWriter combination most of the letter quality (meaning good enough for business correspondence) printing I had seen was done via typewriters wired up to computers. Afterward, many businesses decided the Mac/ImageWriter was good enough for many purposes. Edit: oh, I forgot there were also Daisy Wheel printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printer

smackfu 14y ago

Wasn't the original Mac quite a bit more expensive than a Selectric? Seems interesting that he saw the potential.

larrys 14y ago
Similar - I was an early adopter of "desktop publishing". I was in the printing business and part of doing printing was doing typesetting. For that we had dedicated machines with terminals and large floppy drives which output on photographic paper which needed to be processed chemically. The first machine I bought (Itek) used light shining through a plastic font. Each font cost $40 (iirc) and for each variation (say, bold, once again iirc) you needed a different plastic piece. Anyway in along with the first mac a bit later came the laserwriter and customers started using that for camera ready copy (canarie in the coal mine was only 300dpi way below photographic quality). Later linotype built a rip that could interface a Mac 512k (iirc) with the linotype (about 1985). I spent almost 6 figures on a linotype and became a service bureau. The minute I saw that you could draw a box on a Mac around type (with traditional systems you needed to essentially program this) I knew what would happen. That said I was in my 20's most others in my business didn't see it the same way since they were older. Parent commenter - what was the age of your father at the time he had this revelation?
- russell 14y ago
  My aunt was a linotype operator in the 1950s. One day I visited her at work and she typed my name into a slug. The machine was amazing. It was something like 8 feet tall, maybe more, with a gazillion moving parts. Typing was fairly slow compared to a typewriter, but every time a letter was pressed, I could hear the cast being selected and moving down to its place in the line. Finally she pressed a lever and the line went off to be case in lead. A few seconds (cant remember the speed) later the lead slug with my name on it appeared.
  - larrys 14y ago
    Your comment then forked me to find (on linkedin) the salesman who sold me that machine. Of all things he now works at Kodak it seems. I remember those hot type machines never owned one it was before my time. Someone could probably make a novelty linotype app duplicating the process and the noise the machine made.

acheron 14y ago

My parents tell me that when I was young I said I wanted to be a typewriter repairman when I grew up. Unfortunately I was born in 1982, probably at least 30 years too late for that.