Typewriter

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electromechanical components. These typewriters were sometimes called display typewriters (cf. US patent 4,620,808) or word-processing typewriters, though the latter term was also frequently applied to less sophisticated machines that featured only a tiny, sometimes just single-row display.

Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1990 to Lexmark.

In short, as far as typewriters and word processors are concerned, the 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition. In a given year, most small-business offices would be completely old-style, while large corporations and government departments would already be all new-style; other offices would have a mixture. It was common for clerical staff to have to learn several new systems, one after the other, in just a few years, the pace of change was so rapid. While such rapid change is commonplace today, and is taken for granted, this was not always so; in fact, typewriting technology changed very little in its first 80 or 90 years.

Typewriter/printer hybrids

Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the 1980s, a number of hybrid designs combining features of printers were introduced.

These often incorporated keyboards from existing models of typewriters and printing mechanisms of dot-matrix printers. The generation of teletypes with impact pin-based printing engines was not adequate for the demanding quality required for typed output and alternative thermal transfer technologies used in thermal label printers had become technically feasible for typewriters.

IBM produced a series of typewriters called Thermotronic with letter-quality output and correcting tape along with printers tagged Quietwriter. Brother extended the life of their typewriter product line with similar products. DEC meanwhile had the DECwriter.

The development of these proprietary printing engines provided the vendors with exclusive markets in consumable ribbons and the ability to use standardised printing engines with varying degrees of electronic and software sophistication to develop product lines.

Although these changes reduced prices - and greatly increased the convenience - of typewriters, the technological disruption posed by word processors left these improvements with only a short-term low-end market. To extend the life of these products, many examples were provided with communication ports to connect them to computers as printers.

The increasing dominance of personal computers, desktop publishing, the introduction of low-cost, truly high-quality, laser and inkjet printer technologies, and the pervasive use of web publishing, e-mail and other electronic communication techniques have largely replaced typewriters in the United States.

As of 2009, typewriters still were used by some U.S. government agencies. As an example, it was reported that in 2008 New York City purchased a few thousand typewriters, mostly for use by New York Police Department, at the total cost of $982,269; another $99,570 were spent in 2009 for the maintenance of the existing typewriters. New York police officers use the machines to type property and evidence vouchers on carbon paper forms.

Russian typewriters use the Cyrillic alphabet, which has made the Azerbaijani reconversion from Cyrillic to Roman more difficult. In 1997, the government of Turkey offered to donate western typewriters to the Republic of Azerbaijan in exchange for more zealous and exclusive promotion of the Roman alphabet for the Azerbaijani language; this offer, however, was declined.

In Latin America, India, and Africa, mechanical typewriters are still in common use. In Latin America the typewriters used are most often Brazilian models (Brazil continues to produce mechanical typewriters to the present day), whereas in Africa and India, they are often old or used machines from an Indian company called Godrej.

Legacy

Keyboard layouts: "QWERTY" and others

The "QWERTY" layout of typewriter keys became a de facto standard and continues to be used long after the reasons for its adoption (including reduction of key/lever entanglements) have ceased to apply.

The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "QWERTY" layout for the letter keys. During the period in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented. The near-alphabetical sequence on the "home row" of the QWERTY layout (a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l) demonstrates that a straightforward alphabetical arrangement was the original starting point. The QWERTY layout of keys has become the de facto standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the Latin alphabet sometimes use variants of the QWERTY layouts, such as the French AZERTY, the Italian QZERTY and the German QWERTZ layouts.

The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible, since it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows to type the most common letters. A popular story suggests that it was designed and used for early typewriters exactly because it was so inefficient; it slowed a typist down so as to reduce the frequency of the typewriter's typebars wedging together and jamming the machine. Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word "typewriter" without having learnt the full keyboard layout, because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard. The most likely explanation is that the QWERTY arrangement was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. This allowed the user to type faster without jamming. Unfortunately, no definitive explanation for the QWERTY keyboard has been found, and typewriter aficionados continue to debate the issue.

A number of radically different layouts such as Dvorak have been proposed to reduce the perceived inefficiencies of QWERTY, but none have been able to displace the QWERTY layout; their proponents claim considerable advantages, but so far none has been widely used. The Blickensderfer typewriter with its DHIATENSOR layout may have possibly been the first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout for efficiency advantages.

Many old typewriters do not contain a separate key for the numeral 1 or the exclamation point, and some even older ones also lack the numeral zero. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the lowercase letter l for the digit 1, and the uppercase O for the zero. The exclamation point was a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. These characters were omitted to simplify design and reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. On modern keyboards, the exclamation point is the shifted character on the 1 key, a direct result of the heritage that these were the last characters to become "standard" on keyboards. Holding the spacebar pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism, allowing to type multiple symbols on a single location. The ¢ symbol (meaning cents) was located above the number 6 on old typewriters. Modern keyboards now use ^ above the 6.

A Chinese typewriter produced by Shuangge, with 2,450 keys.

Japanese typewriter SH-280, a small machine with 2,268 keys.

Many non-Latin alphabets have keyboard layouts that have nothing to do with QWERTY. The Russian layout, for instance, puts the common trigrams ыва, про, and ить on adjacent keys so that they can be typed by rolling the fingers. The Greek layout, on the other hand, is a variant of QWERTY.

Typewriters were also made for East Asian languages with thousands of characters, such as Chinese or Japanese. They were not easy to operate, but professional typists used them for a long time until the development of electronic word processors in the 1980s.

Computer jargon

Several words of the typewriter age have survived into the personal computer era. Examples include:

• backspace – a keystroke that moved the cursor backwards one position (on a physical platen, this is the exact opposite of the space key), for the purpose of overtyping a character. This could be for combining characters (e.g. an apostrophe, backspace, and period make an exclamation point - a character missing on some early typewriters), or for correction such as with the correcting tape that developed later.
• carbon copy – now in its abbreviated form "CC" designating copies of email messages (with no carbon paper involved).
• carriage return (CR) – indicating an end of line and return to the first column of text.
• cursor – a marker used to indicate where the next character will be printed.
• cut and paste – taking text, a table, or an image and pasting it into a document. The term originated when such compound documents were created using manual paste up techniques: actual brushes and paste were very early on replaced by hot-wax machines equipped with cylinders that applied melted wax to developed prints of "typeset" copy. This copy was then cut with knives and rulers and slid into position on layout sheets on slanting tables. After the "copy" had been correctly positioned and squared up using a T-square and set square, it was pressed down with a brayer, or roller. The whole point of the exercise was to create so-called "camera-ready copy" which existed only to be photographed and then printed, usually by offset lithography.
• line feed (LF), aka "newline" – standing for moving the cursor to the next on-screen line of text in a word processor document.
• Shift – a modifier key used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters, would previously shift a typewriter's print carriage to allow a different stamp (such as 'D' instead of 'd') to press into the ribbon and print on a page.
• tty, short for teletypewriter, is used in Unix-like operating systems to designate a given "terminal".

Typewriter conventions

Illustrates a number of typographic conventions stemming from the mechanical limitations of the typewriter: two hyphens in place of an em dash, double sentence spacing, prime marks in place of quotation marks, and double carriage returns between paragraphs

A number of typographical conventions originate from the widespread use of the typewriter, based on the characteristics and limitations of the typewriter itself. For example, the QWERTY keyboard typewriter did not include keys for the en dash and the em dash. To overcome this obstacle, users typically typed more than one adjacent hyphen to approximate these symbols. This typewriter convention is still sometimes used today, even though modern computer word processing applications can input the correct en and em dashes for each font type. Other examples of typewriter practices that are sometimes still used in desktop publishing systems include inserting a double space at the end of a sentence, and the use of prime marks (or "dumb quotes") as quotation marks. The practice of underlining text in place of italics and the use of all capitals to provide emphasis are additional examples of typographical conventions that derived from the limitations of the typewriter keyboard—that still carry on today.

Effect on culture

"Get out! Can't you see I'm busy." Early 20th century humorous postcard; boss man puts his arm around female typist.

When Remington first started marketing typewriters, the company assumed the machine would not be used for composing but for transcribing dictation, and that the person typing would be a woman. Flowers were printed on the casing of early models to make the machine seem more comfortable for women to use. In the United States, women often started in the professional workforce as typists (called "typewriters" then); in fact, according to the 1910 U.S. census, 81 percent of typists were female. With more women coming out of the home and into offices, there was some concern about the effects this would have on the morals of society. The "typewriter girl" became part of the iconography of the early-twentieth-century office. The "Tijuana bibles"—adult comic books produced in Mexico for the American market, starting in the 1930s—often featured women typists. In one panel, a businessman in a three-piece suit, ogling his secretary’s thigh, says, "Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?"

The famous quote by Marcus Glenn, "Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter!" also dates from this period.

Correction methods

An old typewriter on display at the Historic Archive and Museum of Mining in Pachuca, Mexico

According to the standards taught in secretarial schools in the mid-1900s, a business letter was supposed to have no mistakes and no visible corrections. Accuracy was prized as much as speed. Indeed, typing speeds, as scored in proficiency tests and typewriting speed competitions, included a deduction of ten words for every mistake. Corrections were, of course, necessary, and several methods were used.

The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special typewriter eraser made of hard rubber that contained an abrasive material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2 in (50 mm) in diameter by 1/8 in (3 mm) thick, with a brush attached from the center, while others looked like pink pencils, with a sharpenable eraser at the "lead" end and a stiff nylon brush at the other end. Either way, these tools made possible erasure of individual typed letters. Business letters were typed on heavyweight, high-rag-content bond paper, not merely to provide a luxurious appearance, but also to stand up to erasure. Typewriter eraser brushes were necessary for clearing eraser crumbs and paper dust, and using the brush properly was an important element of typewriting skill; if erasure detritus fell into the typewriter, a small buildup could cause the typebars to jam in their narrow supporting grooves.

Erasing a set of carbon copies was particularly difficult, and called for the use of a device called an eraser shield (a stainless steel rectangle about 2" x 3" with several tiny holes in it) to prevent the pressure of erasing on the upper copies from producing carbon smudges on the lower copies. To correct each copy, the typist had to go from carbon copy to carbon copy, trying not to get their fingers dirty as they leafed through the carbon papers, and moving and repositioning the eraser shield and eraser for each copy.

Paper companies produced a special form of typewriter paper called erasable bond (for example, Eaton's Corrasable Bond). This incorporated a thin layer of material that prevented ink from penetrating and was relatively soft and easy to remove from the page. An ordinary soft pencil eraser could quickly produce perfect erasures on this kind of paper. However, the same characteristics that made the paper erasable made the characters subject to smudging due to ordinary friction and deliberate alteration after the fact, making it unacceptable for business correspondence, contracts, or any archival use.

In the 1950s and 1960s, correction fluid made its appearance, under brand names such as Liquid Paper, Wite-Out and Tipp-Ex; it was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham. Correction fluid was a kind of opaque, white, fast-drying paint that produced a fresh white surface onto which, when dry, a correction could be retyped. However, when held to the light, the covered-up characters were visible, as was the patch of dry correction fluid (which was never perfectly flat, and never a perfect match for the color, texture, and luster of the surrounding paper). The standard trick for solving this problem was photocopying the corrected page, but this was possible only with high quality photocopiers. Not surprisingly, given the demand, photocopier quality improved quickly.

In actual practice, more than one correction method was often used. For example, if six extra copies of a letter were needed, the fluid-corrected original would be photocopied, but only for the two recipients getting "c.c."s; the other four copies, the less-important file copies that stayed in various departments at the office, would be cheaper, hand-erased, less-distinct bond paper copies or even "flimsies" of different colors (tissue papers interleaved with black carbon paper) that were all typed as a "carbon pack" at the same time as the original.

Dry correction products (such as correction paper) under brand names such as "Ko-Rec-Type" were introduced in the 1970s and functioned like white carbon paper. A strip of the product was placed over the letters needing correction, and the incorrect letters were retyped, causing the black character to be overstruck with a white overcoat. Similar material was soon incorporated in carbon-film electric typewriter ribbons; like the traditional two-color black-and-red inked ribbon common on manual typewriters, a black and white correcting ribbon became commonplace on electric typewriters. But this black or white powder could be partly rubbed off with handling, and so such corrections were generally not acceptable in legal documents.

The pinnacle of this kind of technology was the IBM Electronic Typewriter series. These machines, and similar products from other manufacturers, used a separate correction ribbon and a character memory. With a single keystroke, the typewriter was capable of automatically reversing and overstriking the previous characters with minimal marring of the paper. White cover-up or plastic lift-off correction ribbons are used with fabric ink or carbon film typing ribbons, respectively.

Authors and writers who had unusual relationships with typewriters

William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable sits in his office at Rowan Oak, which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum.

Early adopters

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter in an attempt to stem his migraine headaches and his incipient blindness.

Mark Twain claimed in his autobiography that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewritten manuscript, for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Typewriter collector and historian Darryl Rehr challenges his claim by stating that Twain's memory was faulty and that the first novel submitted in typed form was Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Henry James dictated to a typist.

Others

E. E. Cummings may have been the first poet to deliberately use a typewriter for poetic effect. His grasshopper poem is perhaps the most famous example.

William S. Burroughs wrote in some of his novels—and possibly believed—that "a machine he called the 'Soft Typewriter' was writing our lives, and our books, into existence," according to a book review in The New Yorker. And, in the film adaptation of his novel, "Naked Lunch," his typewriter is a living, insect-like entity (voiced by Canadian actor Peter Boretski) and actually dictates the book to him.

Writer Zack Helm and director Mark Forster explored the potential mechanics of the 'Soft Typewriter' philosophy in the movie "Stranger than Fiction" ... in which the very act of typing up her handwritten notes gives a fiction writer the power to kill or otherwise manipulate her main character in real life.

Ernest Hemingway used to write his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on a tall bookshelf. This typewriter, still on its bookshelf, is kept in Finca Vigia, Hemingway's Havana house (now a museum) where he lived until 1960—the year before his death.

Jack Kerouac, a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed On the Road on a roll of paper so he wouldn't be interrupted by having to change the paper. Within two weeks of starting to write On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120 feet long. Some scholars say the scroll was shelf paper; others contend it was a Thermo-fax roll; another theory is that the roll consisted of sheets of architect’s paper taped together. Another fast typist of the Beat period was Richard Brautigan, who said that he thought out the plots of his books in detail beforehand, then typed them out at speeds approaching 90 to 100 words a minute.

Tom Robbins waxes philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker, and eventually does away with it because it is too complicated and inhuman of a machine for the writing of poetry.

After completing the novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen is said to have flung his typewriter into the Aegean Sea.

Late users

Andy Rooney and William F. Buckley Jr. (1982) were among many writers who were very reluctant to switch from typewriters to computers. David Sedaris used a typewriter to write his essay collections through Me Talk Pretty One Day at least. Hunter S. Thompson kept a typewriter in his kitchen and is believed to have written his "Hey, Rube!" column for ESPN.com on a typewriter. He used a typewriter until his suicide in 2005. William Gibson used a Hermes 2000 model manual typewriter to write Neuromancer and half of Count Zero before a mechanical failure and lack of replacement parts forced him to upgrade to an Apple IIc computer. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote his manifesto as well as his letters on a manual typewriter.

Author Cormac McCarthy continues to write his novels on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter to the present day. In 2009, the Lettera he obtained from a pawn shop in 1963, on which nearly all his novels and screenplays have been written, was auctioned for charity at Christie's for $254,500 USD; McCarthy obtained an identical replacement for $20 to continue writing on.

Typewriters in popular culture

In music

• The composer Leroy Anderson wrote The Typewriter, for orchestra and typewriter, in 1950. It has since been used as the theme for numerous radio programs. The solo instrument is a real typewriter played by a percussionist.
• The Boston Typewriter Orchestra was founded in 2004. Composed of typewriters only, it has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Fox & Friends, NPR, and other media.
• Les Luthiers, an Argentine musical comedic group, created a musical instrument based on a manual typewriter: the Dactilófono o máquina de tocar (“the dactilophone or playwriter”).
• The Dolly Parton song "9 to 5" features typewriter noises as percussion.
• The Pulitzer Prize–winning musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser) is a satire set in the world of big business and features typewriter sound effects in the song A Secretary is Not a Toy.
• The Guess Who used typewriter keys on the track "One Way Road to Hell" on their 1974 album Road Food.
• The Tom Tom Club used the clacking keys of a typewriter to open its 1981 single "Wordy Rappinghood".
• The Winnipeg band Poor Tree incorporates typewriters into its music. Two to three members would type a poem while reading them at the same time, interlocking the lines, words and sounds.
• On the album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Brian Eno takes a typewriter solo in the song China My China.
• Multi-instrumentalist and composer Yann Tiersen has used the typewriter as a percussion instrument in a number of his compositions, notably "Pas si simple" on his 1996 album Rue des Cascades.
• On the hidden track 'Writer's Block' from 2000's Binaural Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder can be heard mashing his typewriter keys over and over.
• Pearl Jam's 2009 album Backspacer is a reference to the backspace key on typewriters.
• A suite of songs entitled "Green Typewriters" is on The Olivia Tremor Control's album Dusk At Cubist Castle, and the sounds of typewriters can be heard in a few of the sections.
• Estonian prog-rock band In Spe features typewriter as a rhythmic instruments in their album Typewriter Concerto in D.
• Thomas Dolby used typewriter sounds (keys and bell) in the track Dissidents from his second album The Flat Earth.
• In Warren Zevon's ballad Carmelita he mentions pawning his "Smith Corona".
• A typewriter is featured in the Jefferson Airplane song, Lather.
• In the musical Chess the song "Embassy Lament", sung by a chorus of unamused consular clerks, features typewriter key strikes, end of line bells, and carriage returns as percussion.
• R.E.M's song "Exhuming McCarthy" from the album Document begins with clacking keys of a typewriter.

In film

• In the 1963 film Who's Minding the Store?, Jerry Lewis mimes typing to the orchestral piece "The Typewriter".
• The 1970s movie All the President's Men begins with a close-up of a blank page filling the screen, then the explosive sound of manual typewriter keys spelling out "June 1, 1972". Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are repeatedly shown using manual typewriters, and close-ups of words as they are typed is used to dramatic effect. In the final scene, as Redford and Hoffman pound away at their machines, gradually joined by other reporters, a 21-gun salute celebrating the re-election of Richard M. Nixon is heard, reflecting the firing of the keys at the beginning. The guns are drowned out by the sound of a teletype printing out the headlines of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon.
• In the 1982 movie Tron, when the Master Control Program's defenses are destroyed, he reverts to his core form of an old man. The sound of typewriters is heard, associating him with obsolete technology.
• In the 1985 movie Jagged Edge, a Corona typewriter with a raised "t" plays a major role in discovering who the murderer is.
• Typewriters in songs and ambient typewriter sounds are present throughout the 1985 movie Brazil.
• A Royal Typewriter was used in the 1990 film Misery.
• Typewriters transform into monsters in David Cronenberg's 1991 film based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch.
• Typewriters are foundational in the soundtrack and the plot for the 2007 film Atonement.

Television

• In the closing logo for his production company, Stephen J. Cannell is seen typing at his desk. The moment he finishes, Cannell pulls the paper from his typewriter and tosses it. The paper toss segues into a black-and-white animation of a sheet of paper becoming his company's logo.
• In the very popular television show Murder, She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury is seen in the opening credits and in a few scenes throughout several episodes in different seasons using a typewriter to type her murder mystery novels.
• On the show NCIS, McGee Types his books on a typewriter. Two people are killed because one of "Thom's" fans digs through McGee's trash and finds his typewriter ribbons that has all of his "free writing" ideas, and almost gets Abby killed.
• In Phineas and Ferb's Musical Cliptastic Countdown, one of Major's agents, Agent M (a monkey) is typing cue cards using a typewriter. Doofenshmirtz criticizes the use of such a machine, commenting that most of the kids watching right now have not even seen a typewriter.

Videogames

• In many of the Resident Evil games, finding an ink ribbon and using it with a typewriter is necessary in order to save the game. The typewriters featured in the games are typically of an anachronistic, antiquated design.
• In the game Heavy Rain, an important detail regarding the identity of the Origami Killer was his use of a Royal 5 typewriter for the letters he sends to the families of his victims.
• In the game Alan Wake, the protagonist uses a typewriter to create the manuscript for his novel. Finding all the manuscript pages is key to the plot.

Other

• The word "typewriter" is the longest English word that can be typed using only one row of keys of a QWERTY keyboard.
• Typewriters are used to write typecast blogs in which text is typed on a manual typewriter and then scanned for posting on blogs, a practice called typecasting.

Forensic identification

Identifying the make and model of typewriters was part of questioned document examination. Because of the tolerances of the mechanical parts, slight variation in the alignment of the letters and their uneven wear, each typewriter had its individual "signature" or "fingerprint", allowing a typewritten document to be traced back to the typewriter it was produced on. The ribbon ink could also be analyzed, particularly if a carbon ribbon was used.

Typewriter analysis was used in the Leopold and Loeb and Alger Hiss cases. In the Eastern Bloc, typewriters (together with printing presses, copy machines, and later computer printers) were a controlled technology, with secret police in charge of maintaining files of the typewriters and their owners. (In the Soviet Union, the First Department of each organization sent data on organization's typewriters to the KGB.) This posed a significant risk for dissidents and samizdat authors.

After personal computers became widespread, these methods became obsolete.

Gallery

• Fr. Francisco Azevedo's 1861 typewriter
  Fr. Francisco Azevedo's 1861 typewriter
• 
  The Pterotype, John Pratt's 1865 typewriter.
• 
  The Hansen Writing Ball, invented in 1865. This model is from 1870
• 
  1868 patent drawing for the Sholes, Glidden, and Soule typewriter.
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  Hammond 1B typewriter, invented 1870s, manufactured 1881.
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  Types in a 1920s typewriter

See also

• Carbon paper
• Correction paper
• Duplicating machines
• Liquid Paper
• Sentence spacing
• Typewriter desk
• Typing
• Word processing
• Writing

Printers and Fonts

• Daisy wheel printer
• Line printer
• Teleprinter
• Typeface
• Typesetting

Alphanumeric keyboards

• Alphanumeric keyboard
• AZERTY
• Chorded keyboard
• Dvorak Keyboard
• Keys
• Letter (alphabet)
• Modifier key
• Projection keyboard
• QWERTY
• Typewriter keyboard

Corporations and typewriters

• IBM Executive series typewriter
• IBM Selectric typewriter
• Smith Corona
• Xerox

Use as Computer peripherals

• Friden Flexowriter
• JOHNNIAC
• UNIVAC 1102

Non-Latin typewriters

• Chinese typewriter
• Japanese typewriter

References

Patents

• US79265 -- Type Writer Machine
• US349026 -- typewriter ribbon, by George K. Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee.

External links

• Antique Typewriters, a look at the Martin Howard Collection
• Antique Typewriter Collecting, History & Resources for the Collector
• Early Typewriter Collectors' Association
• The Classic Typewriter Page
• Robert, Paul (2001). "The Virtual Typewriter Museum".
• Mr. Martin's Typewriter Museum
• The Portable Typewriter Reference Site
• Nick Beland's Typewriter Pages
• Typewriter: Free Minimal Text Editing Software the Behaves like a Typewriter
• In Praise of the Typewriter - slideshow by Life magazine