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

Yo Ben,
  What's going on in Chicago, dude? Apparently you're the only person 
on this list who's hip enough to understand and appreciate the 
Selectric. 

If you have a digi-cam, I would love to see (out of scholastic 
curiosity) what the myth-enshrouded Camwil Dvorak type element looks 
like. Assuming you still have it, of course.

I think it was pretty ingenious of the guys at Camwil to make such a 
thing, but in reality it was a flawed way of approaching the problem 
of making a qwerty Selectric into a Dvorak machine (because of the 
dual-velocity issue, and the issue of type-element 
interchangeability).

--Peter


--- In [email protected], Benjamin Cohen <b-cohen-4@...> 
wrote:
>
> 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
>