Many, many years later I used a modified Selectric hooked up to a cassette-tape based storage system to typeset a yearbook for a student society. The system wor

Many, many years later I used a modified Selectric hooked up to a cassette-tape based storage system to typeset a yearbook for a student society. The system worked on a line-by-line basis, comparable to the 'ed' editor (later bowdlerised and bastardised by Microsoft into 'edlin'). You would type a line, make corrections using the backspace button on the storage system, then press carriage return to store the line on tape. We managed to enter the entire book - which was quite long and wordy - onto a stack of cassette tapes. Once this was done, all that was left was to run those cassettes through the storage system, having it print the result on good quality paper which would be cut into page-sized bits to be glued on templates. ...and then the motor in the Selectric burned out. I managed to find a replacement motor and got the thing working just in time to run the text through. Adjusting the tilt and rotation cables was quite an effort, initially the text would dance up and down the line, characters half-printed and all. The end result was quite good, actually. The Selectric offered proportional spacing and the film ribbon have excellent contrast. Had I not used the Selectric I would have used runoff on a PDP-11. The latter was deemed to cumbersome to my co-authors (who were less computer-minded than I was, this being an agricultural university, and thus could not stand the half-second wait between pressing the 'backspace' key on the VT52 and the cursor responding...). They did not like the 'near letter quality' print from my Panasonic KXP-1081 either, for which I can not blame them anymore (but did back then).