A day in the life of a typewriter repairman

From the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor: a blow-by-blow account of a 90-year old type­writer repairman’s work day.

I some­times use type­writ­ers as an exam­ple of legacy hard­ware that may be obso­lete but must be maintained.

Some­times com­pa­nies must give cus­tomers prod­ucts that feel famil­iar in order to cre­ate a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage and ful­fill exist­ing key suc­cess fac­tors. IBM type­writ­ers were very pop­u­lar in cor­po­ra­tions. Users loved the keyboards!

For many years, the IBM PC key­board used the same “clicky” key­press tech­nol­ogy as IBM’s elec­tric type­writ­ers. Early ver­sions of the IBM PC could be con­nected to an IBM Selec­tric type­writer to print high qual­ity documents.

Photo cour­tesy of Selectric.org

Photo cour­tesy of PC Mag­a­zine.

Tagged as: computer, hardware, IBM, legacy, USA, value-chain