Everyone has heard of the Yellow Pages of course and is used to letting their fingers do the walking. Inside the telephone directory there was also the Green Pages! These pages listed the products and services available from the General Post Office Telecommications. These included the various kinds of telephone you could rent, special services such as radiophones and the very far-sighted confravision. A selection of pages from the Birmingham 1980 directory is below.
As well as the typewriter, some calculators also have keys which have some sort of esoteric mysterious function which we will examine in this new series. Lets start with the lozenge! Not all calculators have this key, those that do in my collection are some of the larger mains powered printer calculators which are designed for heavy duty number crunching.
So, what does this key mean? Quite simply the lozenge means subtotal, important when you are doing the wages on a Friday morning for example. A couple of examples from our collection:
On the Silver-Reed 1250PD at least, a lozenge is generated on the print out when you press the lozenge key. Unfortunately i can't tell if this is also done on the other printer calculators i have yet as they all need new ribbons!
The Casio J-1 was a nice chunky handheld calculator from about 1978. The calculator had the basic four arithmetic functions as well as square roots, percentages, negative numbers and a memory. The cancel buttons are a rather nice orange while the others are white, black and beige. A very late 1970s colour scheme and quite frankly wonderful.
The J-1 had a NEC D1877C processor and an eight digit VFD display. Our one seems to work pretty well.
It seems like every time i buy a typewriter these days that i say this will be the last one for some time... and then a few weeks later buy another. Well lets say that again, i have just received a rather lovely Silver-Reed Leader II which is number 31 in the collection. I don't intend to get any others for now, but you know how that works out!
Time to fit another ribbon, this time the lucky recipient was my Silver-Reed SR10 one of the two typewriters received this year so far. Actually a third is now on the way but i may slow down a bit after that. Of course i always say that. The SR10 now types nice and clearly, a good little machine.
I'm on a bit of a roll with printer equipped calculators at the moment (no pun intended). The latest is this Ibico 1212 which looks like it might be an early 1990s machine, so not as old as some in the collection though does have a rather tasty VFD display. It powers up though seems to have some bit rot so can't do anything with number entered. The printer makes a sound but as there is no paper roll yet i can't tell you if that works or not!
In an age of planned obsolesence and our tools lasting not very long before breaking (and often not being repairable), typewriters are reassuring long-lived and resilient. Some of the machines in my collection date from the early 1960s and still work perfectly well, and other collectors have machines which are much older still. Some typewriters have had a hard life, millions of keys pounded, treated poorly in terrible conditions and yet are still working fine after a clean-up and a bit of oil.
The first typewriter in my collection was my Brother Deluxe 1350, a late 1960s or early 1970s machine, which i bought in 2013. I took it out of storage a few days ago and used it for the first time in a couple of years and it still works perfectly.
Now of course this longevity really only applies to manual typewriters, electrics suffer from the same bit rot and electrical decay issues as other electrical items. However, it is reassuring that even in the event of a global nuclear armageddon we will still be able to use our typewriters in the smouldering ruins of civilisation. Though getting replacement ribbons may be tricky.
