11 thoughts on “We Knew It”

      1. My mom had an Underwood where each typebar had four characters and a lever to raise or lower the basket to switch between pica and elite. It was quite a hefty beast. I’ve got a late 1960s Sears-branded Change-a-Type somewhere, and a still-working electronic typewriter that uses daisy wheels. The other day I found a Selectric ball hanging around. Souvenir maybe.

        1. I found a Selectric at an estate sale a couple of years ago and took it home on 50% off day. It’s all gummed up to heck, but the power works and the few loose keys works, too, so it should be restorable.

          It’s the loveliest shade of Cold War Industrial Blue, to boot, and weighs about as much as a Volkswagen…

        2. Had a Hermes portable with Elite face that I used all through high school and college. Had a good keyboard feel and was quiet – for a typewriter.

          I remember when IBM Selectrics were standard equipment in offices of all kinds – especially government offices and doctor’s offices. Secretaries – remember secretaries? – craved Selectrics as status markers. Ran every other office typewriter maker into the ground.

          Hang onto that ball. It’s probably already a rare and valuable antique and will only get more so.

          Used to know a guy who made and sold training videos for office machine repairmen (and his customers were essentially all men) including a number of titles dealing with Selectrics. He was a German immigrant with an accent so he hired Russell Arms to narrate his videos. If he was still around, he’d be a YouTuber now but I’m sure he’s long gone as he was in his 40s almost a half-century ago.

          Lots of antique mechanical tech got crushed by digital electronics. Addressograph-Multigraph Corp. was a Fortune 500 enterprise in my youth with a huge manufacturing plant in Cleveland.

          One of my early jobs was running Multigraph printers for my city’s government offices. They were miniature offset presses with thick gooey ink that came in tubes and had to be squeezed into the machine with a caulking gun. There were also mysterious slimy fluids that had to be slathered onto the special masters that had to be typed with special ribbons. These acted as printing plates. It was a slow, complicated and messy business to run off a multi-page document.

          The city had an Addressograph machine too. It was essentially a typewriter that punched up to four lines of text into a soft sheet metal “dog tag.” The city government had dozens of trays of these things that it ran through a magazine-fed printing machine once a month to send out utility bills.

          The multigraphs went away my second year on that job and got replaced by big Xerox and Kodak copiers. This was in the late 60s. The Addressograph went away too, though I don’t recall what replaced it. Running that beast was never part of my job description.

          According to Wikipedia, Addressograph-Multigraph moved from Cleveland to L.A. in 1978 and went broke there in 1982. I guess the company decided that it might as well die in the sun.

          The early 1980s were not a good time for legacy smokestack industry in L.A. Bethlehem Steel had a plant out here that also went belly up about that same time. Wasn’t a big surprise to me as I had put in some time there in the late 70s when I worked for an IT consulting company that was doing some work on contract. Never seen a place that had a stronger stink of impending death about it.

          We were doing some COBOL work on IBM System/3 computers. The System/3 was a line of – I guess you’d call them “mini-mainframes” – that IBM seemed to have ginned up as a contingency against being broken up by the DoJ which had started an anti-trust action against them during, I think, the late Johnson administration. The early System/3s were strictly batch processors and used a proprietary 96-column punched card with little round holes that was about 1/3 the size of the classic 80-colunmn Hollerith punch cards with the rectangular holes.

          The suit had been going on for something like a decade at the time we were doing this work at Bethlehem. Being a nearly century-old company at that time, Bethlehem had used the previous line of low-end IBM batch mainframes, the 704 series. They had a huge corpus of applications written in some proprietary 704 language.

          Some bright lad at their HQ back east had written an interpreter in System/3 assembly language that allowed these old apps to continue being run – and even to be updated and maintained – on System/3 hardware once the 704 series was retired.

          The System/3s at Bethlehem all used 80-column Hollerith cards – a little-used option IBM probably supported just for a few old, but large, customers like Bethlehem – so as to make it easy to directly process the 704 apps, compiler and utilities.

          Brilliant in a completely wackadoodle way. I’m sure the guy had a wonderful time developing the thing.

          Here’s to the good old days – may they never come back.

  2. ”The Switzerland women’s national football team, currently ranked 23rd globally, experienced an unexpected 7-1 loss to Luzern’s U15 boys team in a friendly match. This defeat has sparked a significant debate regarding the skill levels and pay equality in women’s football. Critics argue that this result might challenge the push for equal pay, suggesting that if women’s teams are to be compensated on par with men’s teams, then youth teams like the U15 boys should also be considered for similar financial rewards.”

    https://x.com/i/trending/1937841752443887728

  3. Elitism and condescension doesn’t seemed to have helped the Democratic Party “insiders” in the NYC mayoral primary race.

    Wonder how hard they’ll work to undermine the socialist?
    I guess the keyword there is “work”.

    1. Saw a pic claiming that his support comes primarily from the middle and upper classes, so there wont be undermining him from the “elite” but cheering him on.

      The poors favored Cuomo

  4. “AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, and if garbage goes in, garbage comes out. I have argued with Grok when it’s given me responses to questions, and it corrects itself if I prove I am correct.”

    Fact checking Grok, not so much but the other Grok you access through the Grok button will do this but it is important to keep in mind, Grok is a flatterer.

    “I was told by my betters and elites that tariffs were inflationary. I blogged that they were wrong. Tariffs are not inflationary. They act like a tax, so things slow down.”

    This is a great point.

Comments are closed.