Research

WELCOME TO THE TYPEWRITER MUSEUM. All of the typewriters on this page are owned by me, but are only on public display virtually through this Web site. The typewriter collection contains over 120 typewrites from 23 manufacturers spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, from at least ten countries (United States, Japan, China, East Germany, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, England and the Nethelands). The museum contains at least one typewriter from each decade since the 1880s. Several of the typewriters and Mr. Martin were on the History Channel television show Modern Marvels episode called "Retro Tech" which originally aired on December 19, 2008. Typewriters were quite expensive when new, sometimes exceeding the equivalent cost of a laptop computer today. They are also very finely crafted and cool machines. While many are quite old, a lot of typewriters were sold and they were made to last. Therefore, old typewriters are still quite plentiful and hence most of them not very expensive. Most of my typewriters were acquired for under $20 each. I obtain most of them at local garage or estate sales and a couple from thrift stores or eBay. Some of the earlier and more unusual typewriters are valuable, however. Looking on eBay and reading books also reveals that some rare typewriters can sell for thousands of dollars. Read on if you wish to read about my experience with computers making typewriters largely obsolete or go directly to viewing the specific typewriters. The typewriters are arranged alphbetically by brand. Within a brand, they are arranged by date.

Welcome to the Selectric Typewriter Museum! I am Jim Forbes, curator. The Museum started out as my "new" home page in 1999, just after I bought nine Selectric typewriters from the local school district at auction for $12. The actual typewriter content is now just a small part of the Museum, which covers some of my wildly varied technical interests. The Museum was hosted by my Internet service provider until spring 2004, when I took the plunge and got a domain name and hosting service for it. I was constantly having to delete files with the 10mb limit, and now I have 500mb to play with, so I can leave up some of the larger files such as circuit board and schematic scans. With the added room I should be able to build a "how Selectrics work" page, using information from a 1962 IBM Selectric Terminal manual I have.

A timeline history of the IBM Typewriter with old ads to show what the machines looked like.

Obviously one of the great inventions of our time has been the computer. Today, billions use computers in their daily life. While the first computers were extremely large and took up entire rooms, today, computers are extremely small and can not only fit on your desktop, but in your phone and on chips the size of grains of rice. Throughout the years, the computer has evolved from an extremely expensive, cumbersome and slow device to today’s extremely smart and quick machines with incredible processing power.

Below is a list of famous people and computers in the history of computing. The list is divided into five categories or generations based on the type of technology used in the construction of the computers or computing devices.

What was the first computer and who built it? It turns out that this is more a question of definition than a question of fact. The computer, as we now understand the word, was very much an evolutionary development rather than a simple invention. This article traces the sequence of the most important steps in that development, and in the earlier development of digital calculators without programmability. It may help you to decide for yourself whether you think the first computer was the ABC, the Z3 (aka V3), the ENIAC, the SSEC, the Manchester Mark I (aka Baby), the EDSAC, or perhaps yet another machine -- and how to apportion the honor of invention among John Atanasoff, Charles Babbage, Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse, and others.

CSIRAC was built by CSIR in 1949 and it was the fourth computer in the world - it completed more than 1 000 projects by the time it was turned off in 1964.

“The range was undoubtedly a success story for ICT and later ICL. While many people and groups contributed, its success owes a great deal to the skill and dedication of engineering teams throughout the company.”

I collect bits of information about old computers. I started out with a passion for the Elliott 803, but have widened my interests somewhat.

The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) located at Bletchley Park, is an independent charity housing the largest collection of functional historic computers in Europe, including a rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic programmable computer. The National Museum of Computing is a separate entity to the Bletchley Park Trust, but all visitors to the Park can visit TNMOC, when it is open, for a modest charge. Visitors coming to TNMOC only need not pay the Bletchley Park entrance fee.