23 Dec Farewell Selectric – feedback

Long-toothed newshawk Dan Badel recalls:

Model 28

I distinctly remember several of us standing around watching in awe in early 1976 as our trusty Remington was set aside and our first IBM Selectric was set up in the newsroom at CIGO radio in Port Hawkesbury. The entire set of characters fit on one shiny little rotating metal ball, which you could easily swap to change fonts or type size.

For news copy, we used the ball that produced only oversized upper-case letters because they more-or-less matched the font used on CP wire service stories tapped out 24/7 on our two monster-sized Teletype Model 28 printers, which cranked out the news at a mind-boggling 60 WPM with their distinctive clickety-clack sound, occasionally punctuated by bells alerting us to news bulletins.

I shudder to even think of how many rolls of paper and smelly black ribbons I changed over the years .