it was a sad day when the genus Compositor was replaced by the daisy wheel Rhu, what is a daisy wheel? Ooo, Ooo, I know! as typewriters moved to being electronic, you got back to the same problems that had force typewriter manufacutors to employ the QWERTY layout..
people could type fast! and if you went to fast, all the mechanism that drove the keys jammed..
several manufactors came up with different solutions.
IMB came out with its famous ball-- and other big design inovation was the daisy wheel.. think of a plastic daisy about 3 inches across.. at the very tip was the "letter" in the center a slotted hub. the petals of the daisy, were slightly flexable. the wheel could turn, (and there were several design for turning.. one just had the wheel always spinning, and just being stuck when the right letter was dead center at the top, the other had a wheel the moved in either direction, the fastest way to put the letter in position.
both the ball and the daisy wheel had many fewer moving parts.. the ball twisted and turned until it was in position, and then it fell forward onto the ribbon..
the daisy wheel spun, and had only one "hammer" to press the letter on the petal end to create a letter.. one hammer (not 55 or 60, meant no more hammer jams.)
an other great feature of both, was they were removeable, and replacable.. so you could change fonts.. and have pica or courier, or some other font..and you could by different font sizes.. so you could have a true 10 or 12 point font. or an italic font.
with a bit of effort, you could have a single document that had a size 12 pica, a size 10 pica and an italics pica in either size.. Documents that looked typed set! from a computer or even from a typist.
my first computer had a brother daisy wheel typewriter with a computer interface as a printer. (my ex refused to learn anything about computers, and wanted an electronic typewriter in the house.. this did double duty for 10 years or so.)
a third kind of professional printer (one actually still found, since they are almost indestructable, and still work, and are fast, so they are still in use) is a belt printer.. it had the letters in order, in a big belt.. each belt had about 3 to 5 copies of every key possible.. and each printer had oh, 90 hammers.. but each hammer was straight
(think of a piano board.. each key almost a straight path to each hammer.. piano hammer don't jam because the are hitting each other.. (typewriter hammers were in a semicircle,and each was aimed at the same spot.)so here is this belt. standing still, there are 90 hammers, and infront of each hammer is a letter..or a symbol. depending on the set, this could be from 75 characters to 200!
(a quick count, and i see i have 75 symbols associated with my 101 key board.. but i can print other symbols, like a paragraph symbol..) each hammer is a space on a peice of paper.. (up to 14 inches wide)-- and since each one is straight, it doesn't interfer with any other.. so in theory (and actuality!) 5 or so could fire at the same time.. and if a computer figures out.. that character in the third space is going to be a A, it then checks the rest of the belt, and sees if any other letter is perfectly lined up.. and chances are one or more is... so a line might get printed like this
T i u r .
and then as the belt moved.. it would add more charactors
Th ui r w f x ju o r e y b w d .
and more
The quic brow fox jum e ov r t e la y b own do .
and finaly you'd have
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.
is sounds like a stupid way to work, but the belt went round at 30 or more revolutions a minute, and each revolution had 5 sets of the alphabet, and a whole line could be printed in under 4 revolutions.. so you could get
10 lines in a minute! and of course, the belt was changable, and you could change fonts, too..
but all those hammers hitting was noisy! so these printers are never in a regualar work area!
and there is a brief history of typewriter type printers.. that made it possible for any one to create complex documents, with mixed font, with out needing a special typesetter.. it could be done by idiots like me!
i help my son do a paper, and the main text was 12 point font, but all the descriptions for the diagrams (and there were about 20,) was in size 10 font. (he did all the thinking part of the paper.) when it was all done, it looked great.. it still like typewritten.. but not quite.. the different font size made a big difference.
