Learned to type in elementary school late 1960s on a Royal manual. Could do 23-24 wpm. California began gifted/talented education in 1961, paying extra funds to schools that offered gifted education programs. One of the stipulations was that the school had to offer additional enrichment education in fields not otherwise covered by the curriculum. Our school district did this by creating a "geek class" in 4-5-6th grades, with pull-out enrichment sessions. The geeks got typing classes two weeks twice a year for two years, or eight weeks of instruction over two years. We did other enrichment units as well, but the ability to type in those days was considered a key academic skill for potential high school and college honors students (and basic computing to this day is still considered a basic academic skill, required in many school districts). I could do 38 wpm on our home typewrite, discussed below, which motivated me to keep trying. Clearly electric typewriters were the wave of the future.
At home, we had a Smith-Corona Electra portable. It had type bars and a standard ribbon, you could lock the type bars if you pressed two keys too close together in time, but the keys were electrically powered: it didn't matter if you applied too much or too little pressure on the key, the impression came out right. It had a moving carriage like a manual, though some later models had a Carriage Return button so you didn't have to push the level manually to return the carriage to type the next line. We called these "electric typewriters" (not electronic).
The IBM Selectric was also considered an electric typewriter, but there was no moving carriage. The type ball moved left to right across the page and imprinted the text from a plastic film tape. The platen moved up a line (or two, depending on settings) at the end of a line; you pushed a Return key to do this, it wasn't automatic. In this respect, it shared some features with future dot matrix printers. As far as I know, Selectrics initially were leased by IBM to businesses and schools, but you couldn't buy one in a retail store. I knew one girl in college who had one, I suspect her father leased some for his business and leased an extra one for his daughter to take to college.
"electronic typewriters" came on the market in the early 1980s. They often used a daisy wheel with fonts plus a plastic film tape. Daisy wheel moved across the page like a Selectric. Better models had memory and the best ones could function as primitive word processors. Some could be used as computer printers (but rather slow...).
I bought a Smith-Corona Coronet portable electric for $119 in the fall of my junior year; between my parents, my sister, and I, there was too much work for a single typewriter, plus my parents knew I would need one for college. The store also had the model with Carriage Return button for $149, but I thought it was too much money. I used this machine for "word processing" until I bought my first PC in the mid-1990s, so the Smith Corona gave me 24+ years of reliable service. During college years, I used to drop mine off at a typewriter repair store at the end of the school year. They would perform annual suggested maintenance (lubrication, replace worn belts, make adjustments) and store the machine for me over the summer (I was from California and went to school in New England). This relieved me of having to find secure storage for the machine over the summer, nor did I have to tote it home on the plane when I went home for the summer.
The machines below with manual carriage return resemble the one I owned. The side view is of a slightly earlier "Electra" model, while the overhead view is of my "Coronet" model. The white buttons adjusted the margins. Left of the platen is a selector level for single, double, or triple spacing. There were numbers and lines embossed on the left end of the platen (you can see a "9") which told you---if you remembered to align your paper and platen when you began---how many inches until the bottom of the page. This was useful if you had to do footnotes rather than endnotes. My model, probably a bit newer than the Electra shown here, had a "Half Space" key to the left of the space bar. This allowed you to retype an erroneous word and squeeze in or delete an additional letter, without having to retype the entire line. The key to the right of the space bar is the "Power Space" which simply advanced the carriage repeatedly if you kept it depressed; my model did the same simply by depressing and holding the space bar.
The white-banded key (#1) on the Electra was a key that could be changed to do foreign language fonts (German, French, Spanish). The "1" could be substituted by a lower case "l", and "!" could be approximated by typing a comma, backspacing, and typing a period below it. Copy Set adjusted the keystroke pressure in case you were doing carbon copies.
The third image shows the higher end Coronet--the one I thought was too costly--- with Power Return button: no more manual return level to move the carriage back. The final image (yellow typewriter) shows a mid-1970s, fully loaded Coronet 12 with Power Return key AND a pop-out ribbon cartridge rather than a spool ribbon. I am not sure when the cartridge was introduced, but it was not available in 1972 when I bought my machine, and many of my college classmates arriving to start school in 1974 came with brand new cartridge Coronet 12's (their high school graduation or off to college gift from relatives), so the cartridge was introduced 1974 at the latest. Possibly in 1973. By 1974 the manual carriage return had been phased out and all of the new models had Power Return keys. [this post was last edited: 2/25/2016-13:02]
