HACKER Q&A
📣 lifeplusplus

Are There Digital Typewriters?


Basically I want a printer which prints live as a I type with minimal latency.

Is there a product like that. If there is no printer maybe there is a typewriter which hooks upto computer via usb and i can type on my computer using the keyboard I'm accustomed to.


  👤 simonblack Accepted Answer ✓
Why are you insisting on going back to the 1970s?

What you are describing is more or less what my first computer terminal was in 1978: a second-hand ASR33 (https://trmm.net/Model_ASR33_Teletype/). If that's too big and bulky for you, there was a Brother electronic typewriter in the mid-1980s that could save small amounts of text in its memory for printing later. (https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/85456117) You could also interface it to some form of computer.

These things were superseded by word-processors: Dedicated computers that had screens, keyboards and printers. That enable you to prepare text, fix up your typos, shift text around, and when you were satisfied with it, to print out your final copy.

Finally we had general-purpose personal computers that could not only do word-processing, but were just as happy doing financial work and also browsing the internet.