Re: Build-your-own IBM Selectric typewriter with Dvorak keyboard!

Peter's story is interesting.  Here's mine from an old post to this list:

Bob said:
   >in the early days of the IBM selectric it was delivered and installed by a
   >salesman.... it was an $800 typewriter in those days, the DVORAK option
   >was about $1.50 at the time.

The early days of the IBM Selectric would have been in the early 1960s. I
first saw one at the World's Fair in Seattle in 1962. I met my first IBM
sales rep around late 1964. I was told that a Dvorak element would be a
custom item: $15,000 for the first one, $10 for the second one. I got my
first Dvorak element from Camwil, Inc. (Honolulu, HI) about 1975. Using a
standard IBM Correcting Selectric II is a problem: the Selectric is
programmed to hit less hard for a period, semi-colon, and comma. If it hit
with the same velocity for each character, it would be punching holes in
the paper. For a Dvorak element, you needed optional "velocity control", a
switch near the Return key to increase the velocity for those keys so that
w, v, and s would not be faint. I bought a Correcting Selectric II with
velocity control for use at home (and specified it for any new ones we
bought for the office). Using a Dvorak element <snip>
on a machine without velocity control is not wholly satisfactory.

Ben
Ben Cohen

"Before Heisenberg, T.S. Eliot said,
'Examination of history alters history'
And Ezra Pound
And even earlier poets,
Reported their discoveries
That in one way or another
The act of thinking alters thought itself."
R. Buckminster Fuller