The world once ran on hardcopy, and when the digital age started to bring new tools and ways of doing things, documents were ripe for change. Today, word processors and digital documents are so ubiquitous that they are hardly worth a thought, but that didn’t happen all at once. [Cathode Ray Dude] has a soft spot for old word processors and the journey they took over decades, and he walks through the Olivetti ETV 2700.
The ETV 2700 is a monstrous machine; a fusion of old-school word processor, x86-based hardware, and electric 17 inch-wide typewriter.
With it one could boot up a word processor that is nothing like the WYSIWYG of today, write and edit a document, and upon command, the typewriter portion could electronically type out a page. A bit like a printer, but it really is an electric typewriter with a computer interface. Characters were hammered out one at a time with daisy wheel and ink ribbon on a manually-loaded page using all the usual typewriter controls.
While internally the machine has an x86 processor, expects a monitor and even boots MS-DOS, the keyboard had its own layout (and even proprietary keys and functions), did not support graphical output, and in other ways was unusual even by the standards of the oddball decades during which designers and products experimented with figuring out what worked best in terms of functionality and usability.
Nowadays, we see AI-enabled typewriter projects and porting vintage OSes to vintage word processor hardware, but such projects are in some part possible in part thanks to the durability of these devices. The entire video is embedded below, but you can jump directly to what the Olivetti ETV 2700 looked like on the inside if that’s what interests you most.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!
MASS11 anybody?
In 1979 I built a word processor based on a 1k RAM Kim-1 board expanded to 5k. It has a TTY interface. I bought a bear up IBM Selectric typewriter terminal and interfaces it. I stored data on tape cassettes. I still have it in boxes.
I almost bought a grid of solenoids designed to turn an old Selectric (most didn’t have any computer interface) into a parallel printer.
But I lacked the Selectric, Even used they were a small fortune.
My mom had a Smith Corona that you could type into a single line LCD, proof read it, the hit print or whatever and it would hammer out text at max speed. I used this to type papers in the 80’s and early 90’s.
I learned to type on that by just putting a newspaper next to it and going to town. Within a short time (a week or so) I could easily touch type. A short time later I could type faster than the typewriter. That is some deep satisfaction to finish a sentence then wait for the typewriter to catch up.
I have — in storage — a Smith Corona typewriter with a DE-9 jack in the back. It was originally sold alone or together with a CRT monitor, a keypad, and a “PWP” box that together made it a word processor; you could also get a widget that connected it to computers via serial port, to act as a printer. I’ve long been meaning to reverse engineer the protocol that gets keystrokes out and sends printer commands in, so I could build a little box to turn it into a teletype, but that project has been on the back burner for a long while.
I’ve thought a very similar thing would be cool – there’s the ultra compact printers which achieved their size by being thermal and printing on fax paper. They could print from a computer, or act as a keyboard for that computer, or be taken away and typed on normally on battery. I think some may have approached the kind of black and white graphics you sometimes see people try on receipt printers.
In another universe where we still use paper despite digital technology there’s a very compact gadget that also integrates a scanner and wireless, so you could run thru a piece of paper, make changes, and print copies of the output or even print back to the original page potentially. That last is what I used a typewriter for – it was useful to be more legible and faster in filling out homework worksheets in school (or forms!) where scanning and making a copy is not acceptable but typewriting was.
My father worked at Smith Corona on their LCD typewriters as an EE during its peak since we lived pretty close (<20min drive). He would ask what their "next" plans were, but they seemed pretty tied up in the classic tech mentality of becoming king in something, but never innovating past that point, and ultimately becoming obsolete as everyone else moves out.
We had one of those typewriters at least thru the 90s — I typed middle/high school papers on the thing and it still worked fine. Def had fun typing faster than its display could keep up and watching the cursor glide/ghost across.
My father worked at Smith Corona on their LCD typewriters as an EE (power) during its peak since we lived pretty close (<20min drive). He would ask what their "next" plans were, but they seemed pretty tied up in the classic tech mentality of becoming king in something, but never innovating past that point, and ultimately becoming obsolete as everyone else moves out.
We had one of those typewriters at least thru the 90s — I typed middle/high school papers on the thing and it still worked fine. Def had fun typing faster than its display could keep up and watching the cursor glide/ghost across.
This reminded of the 3M Linolex word processor I bought at a college auction ($75) (circa 1985).
It integrated the display, keyboard, and dual 8 inch floppy drives (sort of like the RadioShack Model III but in a metal cabinet).
One disk drive was used for the Operating System and the other for storing the data.
It had a deskside CPU unit that was approx. 1 ft wide by 2 ft deep and 2 ft high. (or were the floppy drives in it and not the console?)
On the backside of the CPU cabinet was a serial port with a rotary switch that selected baud settings (110 to 1200 IIRC)
and the port (parallel?) for the wide format daisy wheel printer (132 columns?)
I gave it away ~1987, there was no way I could have kept such a beast in the intervening years, but it would nice to have it again.
This evening I rediscovered some IBM 8 inch floppies in my stash, one of them has a 1979 date penciled on it.
Many years ago there was a magazine called “Micro Cornucopia” which had a very interesting series of articles.
The author successfully repurposed a dedicated word processing machine into a standalone computer. This beast had a Motorola 68000 CPU along with floppy drives, etc. and the author reverse engineered enough of the systems Boot ROM to reconfigure it to run a variant of Flex68K.
I was always envious of this – while at the time I had neither the time or opportunity to do the same, it always stood out as a genuine example of what ‘hacking’ was really meant to be – take something and make it do something new and useful that the original designers did not plan on.
The good old days !
Micro C was the best computing magazine out there, bar none.
I have all the Micro Cornucopia issues! It was the support magazine for Big Board CPM users.
I am collector of Olivetti’s ETV series of video typewriters and other computers of thad brand. You found out a lot about that model, but not all, and something is wrong. This machine and it’s other x86 compatible sisters all can support CGA graphics, so flightsim and many other games run, the ETV 4000s (80286 with Windows 2.0/3.0) has even VGA. See my comment on your youtube video (@klinklangklongklung) and two weblinks:
– https://maschinen-aus-ivrea.blogspot.com/
– https://forum.classic-computing.de/gallery/index.php?album/5-sammlung-von-1st1-olivetti/
I was in sales then and people were fascinated by sales pitch that it was easy to use like a typewriter but also a computer.
They were very expensive low memory with programs that Olivetti promised to have someday.This was the period when businesses feared having to use the complicated MS-DOS programs on regular computers.An associate said he saw lots of these machines junked in a field just obsolete.
When I started my own business I went from selling typewriter ribbons,to computer ribbons to laser toners and printers over a period of years.
CRD does some great tech archeology videos. He seems to come up with endless items from the late 90s early 2000s that I should have seen, but somehow missed out on.
My parents had one of those while I was growing up. I can remember writing some reports on it for 4th grade class. Man that brings back memories, thank you.
Interesting,, early 1970’s I was one of first 5-6 technicians trained to service the Vydec Word Processor . Marketed by Exxon Office Systems. Commercial product but a great tool for law offices and insurances. The next Gen was the Exxon 500. Then the imports came along.. ..
I worked on EOS at Exxon Chemical back in the day. Corky dots still horrify me…