Imagine each of the waiting rooms and typing classes it’s seen in its half-century in the world. IBM this week is celebrating the 50th birthday of its best-selling Selectric line of office typewriters . First introduced in 1961, the road featured a rotating typeball that increased typing speed and will be changed for italics, symbols, and different fonts and languages. The typewriter also eschewed the ancient moving carriage, with the typeball and ribbon taking over the motion, reducing the unit’s overall size and leaving more room on office desks for family photos and troll dolls. These innovations helped make the road nearly ubiquitous in offices spaces, and in 1964, the Selectric line offered up the an early word processor in a position to storing characters. IBM would go directly to retire the road in 1986. Fittingly, the now defunct typewriter would be honored with its own postage stamp.
Design Icon Honored in New “Pioneers of yank Industrial Design” Stamp Series from U.S. Postal ServiceARMONK, N.Y., July 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — The IBM (NYSE: IBM) Selectric typewriter turns 50 on July 31, commemorating a design icon that revolutionized the day-to-day lives of office workers around the globe. The Selectric’s half-century birthday coincides with IBM’s Centennial year and the discharge of a brand new U.S. postage stamp honoring the Selectric as an icon of design.
(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO)
The IBM Selectric became an instant sensation upon its debut on July 31, 1961, and remained the typewriter found on most dept desks until the logo was retired 25 years later, in 1986. With 2,800 parts, many designed from scratch, it was a significant undertaking even for IBM, which have been within the typewriter business because the 1930s and was already a market leader. The Selectric marked an intensive change from previous typewriter designs, and it took IBM seven years to determine the producing and design challenges before it went on sale.
The Selectric typewriter was a game-changer in lots of ways:
Its unique “golf ball” head allowed typists’ fingers to fly around the keyboard at unprecedented speed. A professional typist could clock 90 words per minute versus 50 with a normal electric typewriter.
The golf ball moved around the page, making it the primary typewriter to eliminate carriage return and reducing its footprint on office desks.
Interchangeable golf balls equipped with different fonts, italics, scientific notations and other languages could easily be swapped in.
With magnetic tape for storing characters added in 1964, the Selectric became the 1st (albeit analog) word-processor device.The Selectric also formed the premise for early computer terminals and cleared the path for keyboards to come to be the main way for folks to engage with computers, in preference to pressing buttons or levers. A modified Selectric might be plugged into IBM’s System/360 computer, enabling engineers and researchers to engage with their computers in new ways.
“The Selectric typewriter, from its design to its functionality, was an innovation leader for its time and revolutionized the manner people recorded information,” said Linda Sanford, Senior Vp, Enterprise Transformation, IBM, who was a development engineer at the Selectric. “Nearly 20 years before computers were introduced, the Selectric laid the root for word-processing applications that boosted efficiency and productivity, and it inspired many user-friendly features in computers that we take without any consideration today.”
The Selectric’s elegant, curvaceous form was a trademark of IBM’s industrial design and product innovation. It was created by Eliot Noyes, the famed architect and industrial designer who served as IBM’s consulting designer for 21 years. The Selectric is featured within the new “Pioneers of yank Industrial Design” stamp series from the U.S. Postal Service, which cites Noyes as among 12 important industrial designers who contributed to shaping the look of everyday American life within the 20th century. The stamp displays Noyes’ name and a picture of the typewriter.
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