Friden Flexowriter
It was a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape.
When the time came to make more units, Remington was suffering a management vacuum and could not complete contract negotiations, so Northeast began work on their own electric typewriter.
[6] Eventually, IBM settled on a six-hole encoding, as documented in their automatic justifying typewriter patents filed in 1945.
[7][8] Equipping an electric typewriter with both a paper-tape reader and punch created the basic foundation for what would become the Flexowriter.
[citation needed] Around the time of World War II, CCC developed a proportional spacing model of the Flexowriter known as The Presidential (or sometimes the President).
The model name was derived from the fact that these units were used to generate the White House letters informing families of the deaths of service personnel in the war.
Applications for Flexowriters exploded in the 1950s, covering territory in commercial printing, machine tools, computers, and many forms of office automation.
In the late 1950s, CCC was purchased by Friden, a maker of electromechanical calculators, and it was under their name that the machines achieved their greatest diversity and success; applications are further detailed below.
It is unclear what effect this had on development, especially as Blodgett was apparently biased against electronics, favoring electromechanical solutions to design problems.
The case, although modern looking, was entirely metal, giving the machine a shipping weight of 132 pounds (60 kg).
The 2304 offered proportional spacing and a carbon ribbon mechanism, making it suitable for preparing camera-ready copy.
Larger manufacturers such as IBM and DEC made their own console equipment, and video terminals began to appear, displacing paper-based systems.
[17] While the US White House was using them during the Second World War, in the 1960s, United States Members of Congress used Flexowriters extensively to handle enormous volumes of routine correspondence with constituents; an advantage of this method was that these letters appeared to have been individually typed by hand.
These were complemented by autopen machines which could use a pen to place a signature on letters making them appear to have been hand-signed.
Auxiliary paper-tape readers could be attached to a Flexowriter to create an early form of "mail merge", where a long custom-created tape containing individual addresses and salutations was merged with a closed-loop form-letter and printed on continuous-form letterhead; both tapes contained embedded "control characters" to switch between readers.
The ability to support diverse encodings meant that adapting Flexowriters to generate the paper tapes used to drive CNC machine tool equipment was a relatively simple affair, and many Flexowriters found homes in machine shops into the 1970s, when magnetic media displaced paper tape in the industry.
This worked by having the user type the document on a Recording unit, which placed extra codes for spacing on the paper tape.
The Line Casting Control or LCC product generated paper tapes for Linotype and Intertype automatic typesetters.
There was an "accounting" model with an ultra-wide carriage and two-color ribbon for printing out wide financial reports.
The Friden accounting model was called "5010 COMPUTYPER" and was capable of arithmetic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication & division) at electronic speeds and to print the results automatically in a useful document.
While the final Singer models did make some use of plastics, even they were quite heavy compared to other electric typewriters of their time.
When reproducing form letters from punched tape, the considerable speed and loud sound of the device made watching it a somewhat frightening experience.
Towards the bottom of the unit there was a large rubber roller ("power roll") that rotated continuously at a few hundred rpm.
As the radius at the contact patch increased, the frame rotated clockwise to pull down on the linkage to type the character.
On the upper edge of the cam, as shown, was a little projection that engaged the release lever, which was at the lowest part of the image; this was an irregular shape.
(The "key-down" anti-repeat stop could be removed, so that fast repetitive typing could be done, but this change was difficult to undo.)
In fact, some Flexowriter parts were identical in fit and function to the early IBM electric typewriters (those with rotary carriage escapements, a gear-driven power roll, and a governor-controlled variable speed "universal" (wound-rotor/commutator) motor).
The early IBM rotary-escapement proportional-spacing typewriters (three wheel rotary escapement, spur gear differentials) had code bars to control the amount of carriage movement for the current character.
Another reader found that standard 4-40UNC threads appear to fit some of the cover-attachments; internally, the headless set-screws require fluted Bristol keys, which were not commonly available in Great Britain.
