What is an electric typewriter?

Electric typewriters were, up until roughly the last 10 to 20 years, the standard equipment for producing professional looking docments of written material. You inserted a piece of paper, which turned around a hard rubber "platen" that looked a little like a baker's rolling pin. When you struck the keys (the keyboard was very similar to the modern computer keyboard) raised mirror-image letters engraved on strikers would quickly strike an inked "ribbon" suspended above the paper to produce a "typed" letter on the paper. The resulting material could appear to be of excellent quality for the higher-end machines, or could appear to be of grainy or uneven quality for the less expensive models.

Typing was plagued with difficulties. With a standard typewriter you were not able to "edit" and correct your work before "printing", or producing the final material on paper. Typo's (any kind of spelling or spacing error) had to be corrected the moment you made them, with various knds of "white-out" techniques, because correcting them later became almost impossible. You would literally have to re-type an entire page to correct an error that you couldn't leave in the final version.

It was possible, but difficult and time consuming to produce tables of data with typewriters. Sophisticated graphs and photo's were not possible to produce on the typewriters themselves.

Some of the later models (before they were finally rendered obsolete by computer technology) even included some word processing technologies that helped with some of the many disadvantages of typing.

First answer by Emdrgreg. Last edit by Emdrgreg. Contributor trust: 953 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 25 [recommend question]