okay here's the fucked up typewriter get at it
this is one of my weirder and more disjointed videos imo but given the astonishingly dull subject matter I don't know what else I could have done with it. i decided to just go with my placeholder thumbnail and title too because this is pretty much just a personal indulgence, and I wanted to use the pun "weird processor."
I remember a while ago you posted about getting a Magnavox VideoWriter. A little sad to see it not represented here - I imagine the one you got is either broken, no longer in your possession, or completely uninteresting in all the ways you described?
I only Took Notice of that particular machine because it's the same one that sat on a shelf for years at the last independent computer junk shop in my area (Electronic Discount Supply - basically a smaller version of your RePC), and everytime we went I'd always futz around with its weird keyboard and floppy drive and stuff, but it was always just out of my price range (or rather, the price range of what my dad would've bought for nerdy young me). I seem to remember the keyboard on that one feeling not too horrendous, though. Unfortunately that store is long since closed and I imagine if they never sold it it probably went in a landfill somewhere.
Good video on an absurd machine from an absurd product category!
I got the videowriter down in california and on my way back i visited my parents. My grandniece was there, and I had the sudden realization that if I gave this thing to her, she would type about ten million words on it in the space of a year, and possibly become obsessed with the same dumb shit that I am. when I was her age I treasured awful little artifacts like that. So I left it there with her and didn't regret it for a moment.
Oh that's awesome - I know something like that definitely would've been a fascinating treasure to young me haha
Cosigning the bafflement at that motherboard. Only way I can see them getting there is if they hit on a design for the 1982 model, and just barely iterated on that.
I actually think this has a lot to do with the fact that they WEREN'T stuck in 1982 - Olivetti was actually a very early PC clone manufacturer. their M24 came out in 1983, and I read somewhere that the graphics on their clones were also custom. I've also seen the POST screen from those clones and it's identical to the ETV, so I suspect what's really going on here is that Olivetti had carried forward a very old clone design. the homebrew MDA-esque graphics chip they'd developed was already available to them so they reused it. designing an MDA ASIC probably made a lot more sense 4-5 years earlier, but the work was already done.
I loved this video, dude. Man, I also have the weird old tech bug. I would love to find one of these.
Absolutely amazing video.
I have two electric workhorse typewriters (Brothers and Smith-Corona) from what I think is early to mid 80s, and the transmutation of original typewriter into electric then electronic typewriter then into what felt as a hybrid of proto-printer and a computer (various word processors) always fascinated me. This machine seems to encompass just such transmutation.
My Smith Corona doesn't have any screen for preview of the lines (you type directly onto a paper) but it somehow have memory storage for last 100 characters typed which allows to autocorrect typos (with white correction tape) but in a very, very surgical way, and if a single keystroke is not done correctly the correction position has to be done manually because otherwise the autocorrector starts to access the wrong position on the page.
It is true that typing on typewriter (even on just electric typewriter) feels as very different from typing on a keyboard.
