Olympia

Our other new typewriter is this early 1960s Olympia SF Deluxe. The typewriter looks to work fine (and has the fine looks of a typical Olympia) though a more thorough evaluation will be carried out in the coming weeks.

Olivetti

The first of two additions to the typewriter collection is this Olivetti Lettera 32. I've wanted an Olivetti for some time, it fills one of the gaps in the collecton. The typewriter is a little worn but works perfectly well.

A job lot of calculation machines

My birthday is upcoming and i decided to spend my birthday money the best way possible, on retro office equipment! Two typewriters are pending, hopefully arriving in the next couple of days, but yesterday i received a job lot of sixteen old calculators! Some are a little more modern (though still firmly from the 1980s) than i prefer as i generally go for pre-LCD display machines but there are some interesting machines here (and only one real duplicate) which will be further explored in the months to come.

Rockwell 24RD-II

From 1976 is this attractive calculator with a very tasteful brown and orange colour scheme for the keys. The calculator was powered by a Rockwell A5901CA CPU. This gave the 24RD-II square root and percentage functions as well as the basic four arithmetric functions. 

Whatever function you use, the numbers are shown on an eight and a half digit vacuum fluorescent display. The calculator supported negative numbers and has the extra half digit to display the sign if negative.

Typing in the movies (1) : Cipher Bureau

In this new series we look at some interesting appearances by typewriters in old movies.

A few months ago we discussed the specialist Musicwriter which was a typewriter to create musical notation. In the rather good 1939 spy drama Cipher Bureau we see one (or similar anyway) in action! The film deals with a U.S. government department tasked with cracking enemy agent codes (which the film covers in quite interesting detail).

The key part of the film however is when the enemy agents switch to an ingenious new code which uses musical notes, the spy master planning to send his message over the radio in a live concert! The code breakers are onto this though, they listen to the concert and transcribe the music into notation using the Musicwriter (how realistic this is i don't know, i can't play a note!) 

Thanks to the Musicwriter the enemy spy ring is foiled, the U.S. is safe and everyone goes home happily for tea. Typewriters save the world, again.

Image from movie