[GreenKeys] Re: Flexowriter

[jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu]

For some related material, see the book "Building IBM - Shaping an
Industry and Its Technology" by Emerson W. Pugh, MIT Press, esp.
material starting on p. 95 about Walter Lemmon.  The book is rather
parochial in talking about IBM's product Radiotype and totally ignoring
the large Signal Corps use of radioteletype in WW-II.  Anyway, Lemmon
used IBM electric typewriters for radio communication.  IBM had got into
the electric typewriter business with the idea of having I/O equipment
for small computing machines.

See patents 2,000,764 Lemmon, 1935
            2,000,765 Lemmon, 1935
            2,053,091 Lemmon, 1936
            2,066,786 Lemmon, 1937
            2,074,058 Lemmon, 1937
            2,079,440 Fitch, 1937
            2,101,437 Lemmon, 1937
            2,129,948 Lemmon, 1938
            2,195,852 Doty, 1940
            2,019,864 Lemmon, 1935
            2,049,705 Lemmon, 1936
            2,049,706 Lemmon, 1936
            2,053,092 Lemmon, 1936
            2,066,787 Lemmon, 1937
            2,072,458 Lemmon, 1937
            2,095,336 Lemmon, 1937
            2,104,543 Lemmon, 1938
            2,126,647 Lemmon, 1938
            2,138,639 Lemmon, 1938
            2,297,758 Fitch, 1942
            2,307,123 Fitch, 1943
            2,313,137 Fitch, 1943
            2,318,303 Fitch, 1943
            2,323,388 Fitch, 1943
            2,328,636 Fitch, 1943
And that's just the ones related to using the modified IBM typewriter as a
communication device.
The Radiotype sytem was sold by IBM late in 1945 to Globe Wireless (qoute
from Pugh book)

I haven't tracked down how Friden got into the Flexowriter biz, but
I think you'll find that most if not all of the technology is in that
IBM typewriter work.

I had some more information on Flexowriter, including a guy who collects
and restores them, but now I can't find it.  It was probably on a Usenet
newsgroup - in fact if you do a search on Google groups for flexowriter
and alt.folklore.computers you get about 274 references.

Flexowriters were popular I/O devices for a lot of the early computers,
partly because they could be made in any character code the customer
wanted and they were parallel wire input and output, which simplified
things.  The only one I actually had my hands on was used on a small
computer circa 1960.  The mechanism and even the case work appeared
exactly like that of the old IBM electric typewriters.