Watching Assignment Earth - Typewriter in Gary's office

[Sybok Was Wrong]

I was watching Assignment Earth and thought:
How cool would it be to have that self-typing typewriter! I bet it would be easy to do. A Raspberry Pi, some speech recognition software, and a way to tie it into the typewriters original "software". It might take some thought but there's got to be a way. I checked eBay and there are tons of electric typewriters from the 60's on there - still working - and cheap!

So here's some screen-caps from the episode. does anyone know what kind (Brand) of typewriter this is?

That would be awesome if you attempt to get this working! Definitely would be one of the more obscure and cool Trekkie recreations

 

[draderman]

I suspect the "stand" contains the paper tape mechanism.

Yea looking at that pic, you're probably right. I don't think there will be a cable out there that will connect a Raspberry Pi to that paper ribbon mechanism :P

I'm not giving up tho Elder Knight made a good point that there are electric typewriters from the 80's that had primitive computer ports, so maybe if I can find one of those and a Royal Emperor, I can build a hybrid. I don't care if its not canon on the inside Next I'm going to look into how the 60's era electric typewriters that didn't have a big ass table attached to them auto-typed.

 

[Santa Kang]

LOL Chris I BET there was at least one secretary out there that saw Assignment Earth when it first aired and said, "Hey, that's my typewriter from work!" Who knows - Maybe she went to work the next day, typed the dialogue from the ep into it, and played Roberta Lincoln for her trekkie co-workers

I wonder if some secretary at the studio arrived at work one morning to find her typewriter missing.

 

[Maurice]

I would suspect that the Royal Emperor model used for that automated typewriter was a special model because it would be expensive to include an interface like that in the typewriters if most of them weren't intended to be used as an "automated" one. I did a fair amount of Googling and could find very little about it.

 

[draderman]

I wonder if some secretary at the studio arrived at work one morning to find her typewriter missing.

LOL Or maybe Gene used it as an excuse to buy himself a fancy new top of the line typewriter!

 

[draderman]

I would suspect that the Royal Emperor model used for that automated typewriter was a special model because it would be expensive to include an interface like that in the typewriters if most of them weren't intended to be used as an "automated" one. I did a fair amount of Googling and could find very little about it.

If I haven't said it already - Thanks for all the help and input everyone

Yep my google searching didn't turn up with much either. The wiki page on the Royal typewriter doesn't even list the Emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Typewriter_Company I went thru all (yes, ALL) 2000+ pages of an eBay search for "Royal Typewriter" and all I could find was a 32-page booklet made by Royal with a picture of the Emperor on the front (see post #11)

And yea, I bought it.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

And yea, I bought it.

You did the right thing.

 

[Elder Knight]

Some of the early interactive computer terminals (later 1970s) were pretty much "Selectric" typewriters in a modified housing, connected to an acoustic modem (you put the whole phone receiver into these two rubber cups). You typed a command and hit [ENTER], and the computer typed your response on the same paper.

Said command might be to print your term paper. A good text editing program would justify your margins, stop after each page to let you insert a new blank page, or stop in mid sentence to let you change the type ball to get italics or some such (it did boldface by backspacing and overprinting, and underlining by backspacing and putting in the line).


Off-topic, but not too long ago I was looking at a thrift store and saw what appeared to be a standard IBM Selectric typewriter, but with what must have been a four-foot wide carriage! I guess they used to use these to label wide blueprints or something similar.

 

[Jptrekker]

The self-typing typewriter may have been used by the studio to print scripts, photocopies were in their infancy and it was probably as efficient as a mimeograph, just type the original punch card tape and let it go to work.

 

[Crisp Conditions]

I think efficiency breaks down when it's time to put in the next piece of paper. What little you'd gain out of a typewriter that works like a player piano is that it produces something that looks like it has been typed, as opposed to Xeroxed/mimeographed/etc. Harder to tell you've been sent a form letter. Besides, those other processes work much faster in any case. Which is all the indication you need to figure out why these things didn't take off.

 

[One Lucky Red Shirt]

In the 1980s when dedicated printers for home computers were generally too expensive, there were interfaces (probably RS-232, for Commodores and Ataris and TRS-80s) that worked with electric typewriters. It was a slow process, but better than nothing.

One might be able to retro-fit a modern PC to an old interface to achieve no-touch typing.

i remember the rs-232 speech pack catridge. had a tandy trs-80 color computer. even had a tape player to load n save games on. 300 baud modem. we can type faster than how slow 300baud models would connect to bbs. how i miss the 80s. dungeons of daggorath.

anyways figure i just put my 2 cents in. yes its got to be possible. good luck.

 

[draderman]

I went thru all (yes, ALL) 2000+ pages of an eBay search for "Royal Typewriter" and all I could find was a 32-page booklet made by Royal with a picture of the Emperor on the front (see post #11)

And yea, I bought it.

It came today. Here are a couple pics from the last page: (don't have a scanner sorry)

 

[Maurice]

Well, there you go.

 

[Elder Knight]

Recording your typing on punched paper tape might seem clunky, but I guess it did provide a machine-readable version of your work that could be read in, corrected and re-punched. In those days before word processors, this could be valuable.

(Long ago, I used my school's punched-tape computer terminal to edit an article and print it on mimeograph stencil. I had the best looking piece in the school publication that way.)