This evening, the Rachel Maddow show starts now. Early for a change. I have something to spend this time doing. Exactly. Thanks, my friend, appreciate it. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Very happy to have you here tonight. Who here is old enough to have ever used a typewriter . I took typing class and it was on a typewriter. Im that old. Typewriters started off with a mechanism that looked like this. You pressed a button on a keyboard for a specific letter, but then a little arm, a little bar would swing up from the guts of the keyboard and smack that letter into the inked typewriter ribbon, and thereby pressed the imprint of that letter on to the paper, right . So that was the mechanism. Each keystroke on the typewriter would cause a piece of metal to fling itself up toward the paper. A different little bar with a different letter on it for each keystroke. That was how they started out. But then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. Ibm invented a whole new kind of elect
but then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. ibm invented a whole new kind of electric typewriter, where instead of each letter, each number, each character having its own little type bar that would swing up and on to the paper every time you hit a keyboard a stroke on the keyboard, instead, iselectric typewriters just have this little ball, like a key wee or a golf ball. they called it the font element, and you could change out that ball for a different ball if you wanted to have a different font to type with. and the innovation here was that with the selectric, instead of a distinct and different piece of individual piece of metal, flinging itself up at the paper for every letter that you typed, now it was just this one piece of metal. this little ball that would rotate and pivot to position the appropriate letter or number or character in line with the ribbon to make its mark on the page. it was a big engineering advance in terms of the way typewriters worked. and it definitely chan
electric typewriter, where instead of each letter, each number, each character having its own little type bar that would swing up and on to the paper every time you hit a keyboard a stroke on the keyboard. instead, selectric typewriters had this little ball, like a little kiwi or golf ball, they called it the font element and you could change out that ball for a different ball if you wanted to have a different font to type with. and the innovation here was that with the selectric, instead of a distinct and different piece of individual piece of metal, flinging itself up at the paper for every letter that you typed, now it was just this one piece of metal. this little ball that would rotate and pivot to position the appropriate letter or number or character in line with the ribbon to make its mark on the page. it was a big engineering advance in terms of the way typewriters worked. and it definitely changed typing. but it turns out it also changed spying. because starting in the 19