Typewriter repair was our family business too. My dad opened a repair shop in our garage in about 1980, and at its peak he had a handful of employees, repairing mostly IBM Selectrics for offices and schools in the Seattle metro area. I would wander out there when I was off school and watch him working, or any of the employees who didn't mind me hanging around. The timing was not great, and the family business didn't make it even all the way to his retirement, let alone to the next generation, but I can still smell that repair shop.
My single parent father was a typewriter repairman. He visited offices to repair them, so I spent some of my early childhood in the car outside of various office buildings (highly illegal now, of course). The exact moment it ended was when we were watching the 1984 Super Bowl together (this was in January 1985). He saw the Apple Macintosh commercial and said "uh oh" (paraphrasing NSFW language). He went out and bought the Macintosh on the very first day it was available. I set it up and made a document on MacWrite. Another round of "uh oh." I hit print and the printer spewed garbage -- all of the first cables were defective so the printers didn't work. After he went back to the store and got the working printer cable he decided to find a new line of work.
Real estate (built a few spec houses and then small scale landlord). His last client, BTW, was George Lucas' personal secretary. When she retired that was the end.
Pivoted to copier repair and opened a storefront copy/print shop. He somehow also knew how to operate an offset press (? I have no idea where he learned all this stuff) so he bought a secondhand offset press and moved it into the garage where the repair cubicles had been.
I highly recommend mechanical typewriters for children with anxiety.
A mechanical typewriter has no opinions. There will never be a squiggly line telling you that you did something wrong. It will never turn itself off because you took too long. You never have to wake it up.
It is always there. Ready for you. When you want to use it. That’s a lot of comfort and reassurance for a child.
I have 3 manual typewriters (a cheap brother charger, Olivetti SV something, and a 1920s pain-in-the-neck to use), and 3 electronic typewriters (Brother ML something with single line display, IBM ActionWriter II, IBM Wheelwriter 2000). None of them have needed repairs, but when they do, I'm in trouble.
I constantly use the last one because its simple daisy wheel design and buckling spring keys that feel just like my IBM Model M keyboard (since the latter came from the former), but I have to admit it is a weighty, barely 'portable' typewriter.
One of these days I'm gonna make good on my threat to reverse engineer just enough of the PS2 protocol to mount a raspberry pi zero, some sort of small screen, and some rechargeable batteries inside the upper case margins of this keyboard so it can be a buckling-spring-powered Alphasmart with SD card.
Love me some Ben Eater videos. That's actually what made me realize that I've been thinking about doing this project long enough, and if he can build an entire breadboard computer, surely I can coax together a ps2-to-raspberrypi somehow :)
I will look into those kits, never heard of them before!
Maybe I misunderstand your intentions, but PS/2 to USB converters are fairly standard devices from what I understand that are cheap, and available. No need for reverse engineering :)
There's an excellent typewriter repair shop in LA called Rees Electronics (a misnomer for this application). Fixed up a 90 year old typewriter for me - priceless service.
My nostalgia does not extend to typewriters, because I'm a shitty typist. I do love sewing machines for the same mechanical intricacy and the impressive combination of precision and mass manufacturing that made them accessible to a large number of people.
They're also among the last consumer goods you can actually get repaired. And it's not like it's hard to find a repair shop most places.
I have an old Selectric in the basement that doens't work properly. I occasionally think about sending it off for an overhaul. Still the best and fastest way to neatly address an envelope for a one-off letter.
They've moved down the street to a great new location and last time I was in there, a younger person was manning the desk (which I took as a good sign).
There's a great documentary about this subculture called "California Typewriter". And the book "The Typewriter Revolution" (as well as the accompanying website) are also great!
Not quite typewriters, but my dad started working for Burroughs in the UK during the 1960s repairing their adding machines. They were the ones with blocks of every number and you'd press one digit in each column to select it and then perform the calculation. I don't remember those, but it was lots of levers to clean and adjust.
He then moved onto coin counting machines, this I do remember quite well. They were fully mechanical with a spinning disc, not too dissimilar to a meat slicer, and the coins would filter off and pass through a channel & mechanical counter into cloth bags. In most machines the coins would be pre-sorted, this would be bagging up say 200 coins per batch. The heavy cotton bags were then sealed with lead crimps. These machines were fully mechanical, every component could be swapped out and adjusted. [1] looks very much like the early ones I remember, but I knew the electric ones. These machines were full of rubber drive belts and micro switches.
Many things in our house were stored in those cotton bags, they were great and I’ve still got quite a few to this day. He also collected the used lead seals from them. Every year or so we’d smelt them down into lead bricks to sell for scrap. He built a 'blast furnace' in the garden powered by a 1950s cylinder Hoover, they sucked at one end and blew out the other! Image searching it looks similar to a ZA55 Electrolux [2].
Sometime in the late 1970s the machines changed and gradually became electronic. They had modules you just changed, the display unit was about the size of an A5 folder with a row of Nixie tubes along one edge; I had loads of dead modules to play with as a kid - if only I’d have kept them!
They then moved onto LED modules and with even fewer moving parts in the machine. It was about this time my dad retired, he was getting fed up with the job too. He didn’t want to be the engineer, yes he did wear a white coat over his suit for work, who just changed modules. He loved the mechanical and problem solving aspect of his work.
Slight diversion, but sometimes customers would place 'traps' for the engineers. He went to one place and found a coin in a place he knew a coin could never get to. He Araldited it back in the same place. When he left the owner asked "did you find any money in there" and my dad replied "if there was any in there, it's in the same place".
Another tale, a toll tunnel used their system and he was called in because it kept jamming. He worked through the problem but during that found a lot of coins 'lost' under the conveyor belt between the toll booths and the cash room. The curios thing is, for years the cash collected by the toll booths had exactly matched the cash counted…..
Sorry third one, when we had a telephone installed there should have been a 6-9 month waiting time, but because my dad serviced the machines which did the wages for a lot of companies we not only got one quickly, it was also on the priority repair list along with doctors. It was still a party line, we shared the phone line with the neighbour and had to press a button on the phone to 'claim' the line. If the office wanted to get in touch with him urgently, they would phone the customers they thought he was at that day.
I was also one of the first people in the UK to spend a £1 coin. Because my dad had to configure the machines he initially he had blanks but then had real coins. On the day they were launched he let me have some to spend, so I bought my breakfast at collage with them at about 08:30 on launch day. That was before banks opened so 'normal' people wouldn't have had access to them.
I know I’ve rambled, but this triggered some memories and I though to add them here and hope someone enjoyed reading. I will add this to my "family scrapbook" as I've not thought about these for years.
> He Araldited it back in the same place. [emphasis added]
For anyone like me who wondered what this meant and thought it might be a typo, Araldite is a brand of adhesives that I'd never heard of before. Maybe I'm showing my ignorance, but now I have a new word to use!
Glad you enjoyed them, it was great for me remembering old memories about my dad too.
Yes sorry about Araldite, it's a common word for me.
As others have correctly said it's a two part epoxy glue, but it can do much more that just stick two surfaces together. It sticks to pretty much anything and also has volume so they don't need to be a perfect fit, it fills in the gaps so you can also repair things with chips missing. It's also long lasting and quite hardy to heat and water. Just make sure everything is in place when it sets!
My mother repairs typewriters in her free time and writes a blog about it [1]. There's actually a pretty vibrant community of typewriter enthusiasts who repair their own typewriters.
I had one of those suitcase typewriter deals. I got rid of it in a move some years past. Partly because getting ribbon for it was next to impossible at the time and I had neither the time nor inclination to reink ribbon.
