Seven years after the IBM Selectric’s debut, I was a high school Junior, taking a typing-for-business course. All the machines in our typing-lab classroom were gray, utilitarian behemoths until the day the IBM Selectric arrived. Like a tall, dark, handsome...
The IBM Selectric reported for work in American offices 50 years ago on July 31, 1961. By the time it retired 25 years later, the Selectric had revolutionized office work and inspired many of the features of today’s word-processing computers: The...