The Musicwriter was an interesting specialised typewriter used for creating sheet music. It was invented by Cecil Effinger, a noted composer and inventor, in the early 1950s and thousands were built by various manufacturers including Olympia between 1956 and 1990.
The idea of the Musicwriter is simple, the typebars have various elements of musical notation on them instead of letters. However, to write sheet music the Musicwriter required a very fine tunable way to place the paper in the correct place. A pointer was located above the ribbon to help the operator make their adjustments. A vernier was also available for fine tuning the horizontal position of the carriage. Pressing a key on the Musicwriter did not advance the carriage as on a normal typewriter (all keys were "dead keys"). However, even with these aids the Musicwriter required quite a lot of practice to get the music notation correct!
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| Early Musicwriter keyboard layout [1] |
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| Example of Musicwriter output |
[1] "A music writing machine that works", The Office (1957-08 Vol. 46 No. 2) p. 43
