March of the Adlers: 80 Years of Typewriters
This is a scan of a black and white print issued by Adler in June 1979, to mark the launch of the Adler SE 2000 word processing system and its peripheral memory unit (front). Behind it is the Adler SE 1000CD self-correcting golfball typewriter. Adler lined up its typewriters dating back to the turn of the century, saying the image represented "The evolution of word processing." Evolution, maybe, but progress? I wonder ...
8 comments:
Maybe more of a parade of things that will last and work for decades (or more) to the newest product that will be obsolete in 5 years and never last as an operational machine for more than a decade.
"Progress?" Indeed. An arresting visual. Thanks for sharing!
Very impressive. Thanks for sharing this.
That's a lot of "typeage". Great display!
Bill M is right, even though I am currently using one of those quickly obsolescent inventions. Neat photo.
Nice photo. But where can I find parts to my Adler?
Well, the SE2000 was indeed very progressive, a giant tech leap for TA. It is the most complicated digital and electronic driven ball head storage typewriter (storage to 8 inch floppy disks) I know. As a pro technician for TA, I was lucky to have seen it to be used in real live and also was honored to service it.
I remember this machine! We had the Royal badged version (Royal’s version of the Adler SE1000CD was called the Royal SE5000CD — so I doubt that Royal used Adler’s SE2000 name for this but I don’t remember.) Anyway it was a great, solid and innovative machine. These were the days (early 80s) before PCs showed up on people’s desks. I remember thinking this machine was extraordinary. I do not remember a floppy disc unit attached to the one we had,, so I’m guessing that we used whatever local memory was available on the machine itself. I remember that you could use proportional spaced type cores, which was a big deal, and that it could right justify margins, which was also a big deal! Somewhere I have a high school musical program that was typed on this machine by me, and I remember being very proud of how professional and typeset it looked. This was wayyy before desktop publishing became commonplace. I remember you would type a draft copy, and it would save everything, and then you would replay it, pausing to make corrections or modifications. It was so cool to watch the ball go back-and-forth across the page, pounding out characters that you were not typing. I don’t know what made me think of this machine tonight, but I ended up here by asking ChatGPT (verbally, on my phone) to figure out what this machine was, and it found this page! What a long long way we have come!!
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