Eventually the Selectric would face direct major competition from electronic typewriters designed and manufactured in Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan.

Noyes had worked on a number of design projects for IBM; prior to his work on the Selectric, he had been commissioned in 1956 by Thomas J. Watson Jr. to create IBM's first house style: these influential efforts, in which Noyes collaborated with Paul Rand, Marcel Breuer, and Charles Eames, have been referred to as the first "house style" program in American business.

Unlike the various "Selectric Composer" models, there was no provision for setting the machine to vary the letter and word spacing to create justified copy.

Some of the fonts originally offered with the Mag Card Executive would later be made available for the Model 50 electronic typewriter, which supported proportional spacing with 96-character elements.

Selectric Composer elements can be distinguished by their colored index arrow (the color indicated which of the three type sizes) and a series of letters and numbers identifying the font, size, and variation, for example "UN-11-B" for Univers 11-point bold (Adrian Frutiger had adapted his Univers font specifically for the Selectric Composer).

The "Electronic Composer" (with approximately 5000 characters of internal memory, similar to the later Magnetic Card model but without external storage) was marketed from 1975.

However, the magnetic or internal storage allowed these improved models to avoid the need to type in justified text twice, or to manually set the mechanism for justification of each line.

This allowed much of the time-consuming manual transcription work and proofreading to be performed on less-expensive equipment, while a final high-quality output could be printed on the Composer.

For a number of years after its introduction, the Selectric Composer was considered a highly desirable, powerful desk-sized cold type setting system, affordable by small businesses and organizations.

[14][15] Ultimately the system proved a transitional product, as it was displaced by cheaper and faster phototypesetting, and then in the 1980s by word processors and general-purpose computers.

[16] The Electronic Selectric Composer was released in January 1975 by the office division of IBM; it was an automated, direct impression composition unit with a built in memory of up to 8,000 characters.

Nevertheless, IBM had a large installed base of Selectric typewriters and to retain customer loyalty it made sense to introduce updated models.

The Selectric's keyboard layout put the underscore, hyphen, and single and double quote characters as pairs on their own keys – an arrangement which had already been used on many earlier electric typewriters, including IBM's own Model A onwards.

The operational shaft on the right side powers functions such as spacing, backspacing, and case shifting, as well as serving as a governor, limiting the left-to-right speed with which the carrier moves.

When the interposer moves, each of its lugs engages one of a set of bars (selector bails) that run from left to right across the keyboard mechanism.

[27] Additionally, punctuation marks are deliberately placed about the ball so the maximum amount of energy is used to position the element prior to striking, further reducing the impact.

To position the ball, both of the pulleys on the left side of the frame are moved by their whiffletree linkages, actuated by the selected drive shaft cams.

After a character is struck onto the paper, the mechanism is reset, including replacing all latches on their bails and moving the interposer back into position.

[27] The complex Selectric system was highly dependent upon periodic lubrication and adjustment, and much of IBM's revenue stream came from the sale of service contracts on the machines.

These are available in many fonts, including: symbols for science and mathematics, OCR faces for scanning by computers, cursive script, "Old English" (fraktur), and more than a dozen ordinary alphabets.

The ability to change fonts, combined with the neat regular appearance of the typed page, was revolutionary, and marked the beginning of desktop publishing.

Special elements also were released for the Athabaskan languages, allowing Navajo and Apache bilingual programs in education to be typed for the first time.

Pressing a key does not produce an electrical signal as output, but rather engages a series of clutches which couple the motor power to the mechanism to turn and tilt the element.

However, driving the mechanism at a non-optimal rate would soon result in its failure, by forcing an internal start-stop clutch to actuate for each character typed, thus wearing it out very rapidly.

Continuous typing at the proper 134.5 baud rate would engage the clutch only at the beginning and end of a long sequence of characters, as designed.

If the computer system in turn echoed the typed input, having been configured to expect a full-duplex terminal, each character would be doubled.

Though done to protect the print mechanism from damage,[34] an unexpected keyboard lock activation could cause minor injury to a typist with a heavy touch.

There was little obvious warning that the keyboard had locked or unlocked, other than a faint click from the interlock solenoid, easily drowned out by the printer and fan noise in many computer facilities.

A minor industry developed to support small businesses and leading-edge hobbyists who would obtain a Selectric mechanism (which cost much less than a full-fledged 2741 terminal) and modify it to interface with industry-standard serial data communications.

The typewriter industry followed this trend shortly afterward, and even IBM replaced their Selectric lineup with its daisy wheel-based "Wheelwriter" series.