Showcase (12) : Olympia Traveller Deluxe S

Olympia is one of my favourite makes of typewriter and i have a few in my collection, the Traveller Deluxe S being added to the collection this year. The typewriter was probably made in the late 1970s.

As with my other Olympias, this machine works well and looks good - well apart from the drops. The typewriter is covered in hardened drops of a white substance, which i think may be years of tippex drips! Like all of the best typewriters, this machine has probably had a long and productive life and is still going strong. It had a new ribbon fitted a couple of months ago. 

The Christmas loot

Merry Christmas to all visitors! This year i got two more vintage calculators for my collection rather than the typewriter fest last year (but it's been a while - at least a couple of months - since i got a new typewriter so i must fix that in early 2024!) The new calculators are a really neat looking National Semiconductor 750 Novus and a Busicom 1210PD. 

Now the latter brand, Busicom, is notable. In one of their earlier machines they asked Intel for a chip for the mathematical calculations. The chip Intel produced was the 4004 which can be argued to be the forerunner of the CPUs used in PCs through to this very day... 

Both machines work, the 750 Novus has some pleasing red LED numbers. The Busicom printer works though it needs a new ribbon, a project for 2024 if i can source a new ribbon.

GPO 746/8746 dialphone

In the past, the General Post Office had a near monopoly (apart from one town) of the British telephone system. Subscribers to the service had to rent a handset from the GPO.

Most of these telephones used a dial to enter the number (some people still say "dial" with reference to entering telephone numbers to this day). The telephone most people will think of when they think about diaphones will be the GPO 706 and later versions. We have two GPO 746s (or rather 8746s as we will explain below) in our retro office equipment collection.

The 746 was introduced in 1967 as an improvement on the 706L. The main external difference was an improvement in how the telephone could be carried, as it had an integral cradel for the receiver. This meant you could more easily carry the telephone around with you when you wanted to look cool like a 1970s detective. It also improved how the handset rested on top of the telephone.

The 746 also had a built-in regulator which could not be removed as it could with the 706L. This regulator was used to vary the current flowing through the receiver and transmitter. This could avoid problems for subscribers who were too close to a telephone exchange - too strong a current could make things too loud - and could also reduce interference from strong radio signals. The regulator was an add-on component to earlier telephones but built into the main circuit board of the 746.

The 746 was available in a range of colours, we have red and brown examples. We did used to have black and grey ones too but they seem to have gone to the telephone graveyard in the sky. The 746 remained available for a long time, later examples could be modified to use the New Plan plug and socket (which is still used by BT - who took over from the GPO - and other telephone companies to this day). These telephones were called 8746, both of our telephones are so modified. 

BT lost their monopoly over handsets in the 1980s. Subscribers were free to buy their own handsets and plug them in. The 8746 could still be used though, indeed i continued to use mine well into the 2000s.

Commodore 796M

The 796M was one of Commodore's low cost calculators which were very common in the second half of the 1970s. The 796M was made in 1976 and is very similar to the 776M which we have already covered here. The principal difference is that the 796M is black not beige! 

Apart from that there isn't much difference. The 796M has the same basic four arithmetic functions, plus percentages and memory. Whatever numbers you handle on it will be displayed in a red LED display. Unfortunately, despite the calculator turning on (when fitted with a battery) it can display numbers but cannot manipulate them due to some digital decay in the CPU i assume. 

Selling typewriters in 1990

Another selection of typewriters for sale, this time from the Littlewoods catalogue for the Winter of 1990 and 1991. This time two manual and two electric machines were on sale. The Smith Corona XL 1500 looks very similar to my XE1630. The Maritsa looks a nice machine, i must see if i can get one in 2024...

Mysterious keys (8) : !

In this series as well as examining keys which typewriters have and computers do not we also look at the opposite. We have already established that many typewriters, usually small portable ones, did not have a key for the number 1. Therefore, as it is common for the exclamation mark to share the number 1 on computer keyboards, it should be no surprise that many typewriters also did not have a way to type !

So, how could angry letter writers of their day make their points without liberal use of the exclamation mark? Well there was a clever way to cheat. Unlike on computer screens, on a typewriter multiple characters can be printed in the same location. So to create a ! you simply type a full stop . then backspace then type a dash '.

Typefaces

In HTML there is the TT tag which displays text using the "teletype font", though some assume this also means typewriter. It is sometimes assumed that typewriter "fonts" or typefaces are all the same, or very similar in any case. Something like the Courier New font used in this blog.

In fact every manufacturer tended to have their own typeface, even individual typewriter models could have a unique typeface. Below are a few examples from some of the machines in my collection. They are all pretty similar (except maybe the Tippa's) but all were different in size, width and strength.

More on the Lettera

I have had the Olivetti Lettera 32 for a while now so how is the typewriter like? It is a fine machine that works pretty well with just the occasional slow return by a typebar, the typing is pretty clear and crisp though there isn't a lot of excitement i.e. noise. Aesthetically i am not a big fan of it, though it is the most 60s/70s colour you can imagine, but there are uglier machines in the collection so i can live with that. 

Boots 224

There are two Boots branded typewriters in the collection, so why not a Boots calculator as well? The Boots 224 Memory is a nice late 1970s machine with a square root and percentage functions to go along with the basic four arithmetric functions. As the name implies, the calculator has memory too and works fine, numbers displayed using an eight digit VFD display. This is in fact a rebranded Casio Memory B-1.