The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter

Teleprinter

A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...

, a heavy duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape.

Elements of the design date back to the 1920s, and variants of the machine were produced until the early 1970s; the machines found a variety of uses during the evolution of office equipment in the 20th century, including being among the first electric typewriters, computer input and output devices, forerunners of modern word processing, and also having roles in the machine tool and printing industries.

Origins and early history

The Flexowriter can trace its roots to some of the earliest electric typewriters.
In 1925, the Remington Typewriter Company wanted to expand their offerings to include electric typewriters. Having little expertise or manufacturing ability with electrical appliances, they partnered with Northeast Electric Company of Rochester and made a production run of 2500 electric typewriters. When the time came to make more units, Remington was suffering a management vacuum and could not complete contract negotiations, so Northeast began work on their own electric typewriter. In 1929, they started selling the Electromatic.

In 1931, Northeast was bought by Delco

Delco

Delco may refer to:* Delaware County, Ohio* Delaware County, Pennsylvania* Delco, North Carolina* Delco Electronics...

. Delco had no interest in a typewriter product line, so they spun the product off as a separate company called Electromatic. Around this time, Electromatic built a prototype automatic typewriter. This device used a wide roll of paper, similar to a player piano

Player piano

A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...

 roll. For each key on the typewriter, there was a column on the roll of paper. If the key was to be pressed, then a hole was punched in the column for that key.

In 1932, a code for the paper tape used to drive Linotype

Linotype machine

The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....

 and other typesetting

Typesetting

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...

 machines was standardized. This allowed use of a tape only five to seven holes wide to drive automatic typewriters, teleprinters and similar equipment.

In 1933, IBM wanted to enter the electric typewriter market, and purchased the Electromatic Corporation, renaming the typewriter the IBM Model 01

IBM Electromatic typewriter

The IBM Electromatic typewriter was the first electric typewriter to enjoy long-term commercial success. Unlike the later IBM Selectric typewriter, this typewriter model used a conventional moving carriage and typebar mechanism....

. Versions capable of taking advantage of the paper tape standards were produced, essentially completing the basis of the Flexowriter design.

By the late 1930s, IBM had a nearly complete monopoly

Monopoly

A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...

 on unit record equipment

Unit record equipment

Before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using electromechanical devices called unit record equipment, electric accounting machines or tabulating machines. Unit record machines were as ubiquitous in industry and government in the first half of the twentieth century...

 and related punched card

Punched card

A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...

 machinery, and antitrust

Antitrust

The United States antitrust law is a body of laws that prohibits anti-competitive behavior and unfair business practices. Antitrust laws are intended to encourage competition in the marketplace. These competition laws make illegal certain practices deemed to hurt businesses or consumers or both,...

 issues became a concern as product lines expanded into paper tape and automatic typewriters. As a result, IBM sold the product line and factory to the Commercial Controls Corporation of Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

, which also absorbed the National Postal Meter Corporation. CCC was formed by several former IBM employees.

World War II

Around the time of the Second World War, CCC developed a proportional spacing model of the Flexowriter known as The Presidential (or sometimes the President). The model name was derived from the fact that these units were used to generate the White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

 letters informing families of the deaths of service personnel in the war. CCC also manufactured other complex mechanical devices for the war effort, including M1 carbine

M1 Carbine

The M1 carbine is a lightweight, easy to use semi-automatic carbine that became a standard firearm for the U.S. military during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and was produced in several variants. It was widely used by U.S...

s.

In 1944, the pioneering Harvard Mark I

Harvard Mark I

The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator , called the Mark I by Harvard University, was an electro-mechanical computer....

 computer was constructed, using an Electromatic for output.

Postwar

After the war, especially in the early 1950s as the computer industry started in earnest, the number of applications for Flexowriters exploded, covering territory in commercial printing, machine tools, computers, and many forms of office automation. This versatility was helped by Friden's willingness to engineer and build many different configurations. In the late 1950s, CCC was purchased by Friden

Friden, Inc.

Friden Calculating Machine Company was an American manufacturer of typewriters and electronic calculators. It was founded by Carl Friden in San Leandro, California in 1934. Friden electromechanical calculators were robust and popular....

, a maker of electromechanical calculators, and it was under their name that the machines achieved their greatest diversity and success; applications are further detailed below.

End of product line

Friden was acquired by the Singer Corporation

Singer Corporation

Singer Corporation is a manufacturer of sewing machines, first established as I.M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer with New York lawyer Edward Clark. Best known for its sewing machines, it was renamed Singer Manufacturing Company in 1865, then The Singer Company in 1963. It is...

 in 1965. Singer had little or no understanding of the computer industry, and there was a clash of corporate culture with Friden employees.

Sales and innovation declined. The market for word processing equipment was shifting to magnetic media such as IBM’s revolutionary Magnetic Tape Selectric

IBM Selectric typewriter

The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on July 31, 1961.Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a traditional typewriter, the Selectric had a type element that rotated and...

 Typewriter (MTST), and paper tape based solutions were no longer able to compete. The CNC machine tool industry headed the same way. The computer console market consolidated, and the larger manufacturers such as IBM and DEC made their own console equipment. Video terminals began to appear as well, beginning to displace paper-based systems there.

Also, Edward Blodgett, Chief Engineer of Friden R&D was replaced in 1964 while ill. It's unclear what effect this had on development, especially as Blodgett was apparently biased against electronics, favoring electromechnical solutions to design problems.

(Commentary added by a former employee, who joined Friden in Rochester shortly before Edward Blodgett was hospitalized: Several times, employees who had been there for some time related that Mr. Blodgett had said, more than once, "Electronics is a [dirty] word, and I don't want to hear it spoken in my presence." (Not sure about "dirty", but it was derogatory while usable in polite society). Around that time, a few engineers were working on a partly electronic Flexowriter based on a digital bus, but it was under-funded and used heartbreakingly unreliable connectors.

In defense of Edward Blodgett, this editor is fairly sure that he designed the Justowriter, an ingenious system, and probably made other significant technical contributions as well. Apparently, he was quite capable in the electromechanical field.)

There was a major redesign of the Flexowriter in the late 1960s, adding a plastic case and some electronic interface and control logic and a few indicator lamps. This was the first major change in appearance of the units in nearly forty years. The first edition of British publication Computer Weekly

Computer Weekly

ComputerWeekly was a weekly magazine for IT professionals which was published by Reed Business Information for over 40 years. The magazine was available free to IT professionals who met the circulation requirements...

(Thursday, 22 September 1966) carried an article on the front cover featuring the new design, the Friden 2300 Flexowriter, and noted that it sold for £1400 (in British pounds). This would be the last hurrah for the line, with production halting in the early 1970s.

Automatic typewriters

From its earliest days through to at least the mid-1960s, Flexowriters were used as automatic letter writers.

While the US White House was using them during the Second World War, in the 1960s, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Members of Congress

Congressperson

A Member of Congress is a term used for a politician who has become qualified, appointed or elected, and inducted into some official body , typically to represent a particular constituency in a legislature...

 used Flexowriters extensively to handle enormous volumes of routine correspondence with constituents; an advantage of this method was that these letters appeared to have been individually typed by hand. These were complemented by machines which could use a pen to place a signature on letters making them appear to have been hand-signed.

Auxiliary paper-tape readers could be attached to a Flexowriter to create an early form of "mail merge

Mail merge

Mail merge is a software function which allows to create multiple documents from a single template form and a structured data source.-History:This technique of merging data to create gave rise to the term mail merge....

", where a long custom-created tape containing individual addresses and salutations was merged with a closed-loop form-letter and printed on continuous-form letterhead; both tapes contained embedded "control character

Control character

In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character is a code point in a character set, that does not in itself represent a written symbol.It is in-band signaling in the context of character encoding....

s" to switch between readers.

Console terminals

As the unit record equipment (tabulating machine) industry matured and became the computer industry, Flexowriters were commonly used as console terminals for computers. Because ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 had not yet been standardized, each type of computer tended to use its own system for encoding characters; Flexowriters were capable of being configured with numerous encodings particular to the computer the machine was being used with.

Computers that used Flexowriters as consoles include:

• the Electromatic on the Harvard Mark I
• Control Data Corporation
  Control Data Corporation
  Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
  
   CDC 160
• Electrodata 205. Electrodata was purchased by the Burroughs Corporation, and many later Burroughs machines also used Flexowriters
• Librascope LGP-30
• The BMEWS DIP computer, NORAD COC, Colorado Springs, Colo., beginning in 1960. (This was before the COC went under Cheyenne Mountain.) Tape code was essentially base-32.
• The Lincoln Laboratory
  Lincoln Laboratory
  MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as...
  
   TX-0
  TX-0
  The TX-0, for Transistorized Experimental computer zero, but affectionately referred to as tixo , was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64K of 18-bit words of magnetic core memory. The TX-0 was built in 1955 and went online in 1956 and was used continually through the...
  
  , an early experimental transistor-based minicomputer, which was to be a seminal influence on hacker
  Hacker (computer security)
  In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...
  
   culture at MIT in the late 1950s prior to the introduction of the PDP-1
  PDP-1
  The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
  
  .

Offline punch and printer

Flexowriters could also be used as offline punches

Key punch

A keypunch is a device for manually entering data into punched cards by precisely punching holes at locations designated by the keys struck by the operator. Early keypunches were manual devices. Later keypunches were mechanized, often resembled a small desk, with a keyboard similar to a...

 and printers. Programmers would type their programs on Flexowriters, which would punch the program onto paper tape. The tapes could then be loaded into computers to run the programs. Computers could then use their own punches to make paper tapes that could be used by the Flexowriters to print output. Among the computers which commonly used Flexowriters for this task were the DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 PDP-1

PDP-1

The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...

's.

Machine tools

The ability to support diverse encodings meant that adapting Flexowriters to generate the paper tapes used to drive CNC machine tool equipment, and many Flexowriters found homes in machine shops into the 1970s, when magnetic media displaced paper tape in the industry.

Unit record and early computing

Friden manufactured equipment which could connect their calculators to Flexowriters, printing output and performing unit record tasks such as form letters for bills, and eventually manufactured their own computers to further enhance these capabilities. These variants were sold as the Friden Computyper. Computypers were electromechanical; they had no electronics, at least in their earlier models. The calculator mechanism, inside a desk-like enclosure, was much like a Friden model STW desktop calculator, except that it had electrical input (via solenoids) and output (low-torque rotary switches on the dial shafts).

Commercial printing

A product known as the Justowriter (or Just-O-Writer) was developed for the printing industry. It allowed typists to produce justified text

Justification (typesetting)

In typesetting, justification is the typographic alignment setting of text or images within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin...

 for use in typesetting. This worked by having the user type the document on a Recording unit, which placed extra codes for spacing on the paper tape. The tape was placed into a second specially adapted Flexowriter which had two paper tape reading heads; one would read the text while the other controlled the spacing of the print. Spacing codes were stored in relays inside the machine as a line of text progressed. At least some Justowriters used carbon ribbons to produce clean type.

The Line Casting Control or LCC product generated paper tapes for Linotype and Intertype

Intertype Corporation

The Intertype Corporation produced the Intertype, a typecasting machine closely resembling the Linotype, and using the same matrices as the Linotype...

 automatic typesetters. In addition to punching a tape containing the text to be typeset, it turned on a lamp easily seen by the operator to show that the text on the line being typed could be typeset—it was within justifiable range. The LCC had a four-wheel rotary escapement, and a set of gears between the carriage rack and the escapement, to permit the smallest unit of spacing at the escapement to be quite small at the carriage. The spring-tensioned tape that moved the carriage had far more tension (possibly 20 lbs?) than did a standard Flexowriter.

American Type Founders

American Type Founders

American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...

 produced a phototypesetter based on the Justowriter/Flexowriter platform.

Finance

There was an "accounting" model with an ultra-wide carriage and two-color ribbon for printing out wide financial reports.

Hardware

As a cutting edge device of their time, Flexowriters, especially some of the specialized types like typesetters, were quite costly. They were made with extreme durability. There were porous bronze bearings, many hardened steel parts, very strong springs, and a substantial AC motor to move all the parts. Most parts are made of heavy gauge steel. The housing and most removable covers were die castings. While the final Singer models did make some use of plastics, even they are quite heavy compared to other electric typewriters of their time. As a result the platen carriage is very heavy, and when the "Carriage return" key is pressed, the carriage moves with about 20 pounds of force and enough momentum to injure a careless operator. If used only as manual typewriters, and properly maintained, Flexowriters might last a century. When reproducing form letters from punched tape, the enormous energy input to the device made watching it a somewhat frightening experience. It also produced enormous noise.

Towards the bottom of the unit there is a large rubber roller ("power roll") that rotates continuously at a few hundred rpm. It provides power for typing as well as power-operated backspace, type basket shift, and power for engaging (and probably disengaging) the carriage return clutch.

Referring to the photo of the cam assembly (often simply called a cam; it was not meant to be disassembled), the holes in the side plates at the lower left are for the assembly's pivot rod, which is fixed to the frame. At the extreme upper left is part of a disconnectable pivot that pulls down on the typing linkage. When installed, down is to the right in the photo, so to speak.

Referring again to the part at the upper left, the mating part has a threaded mounting for adjusting cam clearance from the power roll. The irregular "roundish" part, lower right center, is the cam, itself. It rotates in the frame while in contact with the power roll. The surface of the cam in contact with the power roll had grooves for better grip. As the radius at the contact patch increases, the frame rotates clockwise to pull down on the linkage to type the character.

This particular cam assembly has a cam that rotates a full turn for each operation; it might operate the backspace, basket shift, or carriage-return clutch disengage mechanism. Cams for typing characters rotated only half a turn, the halves of course being identical.

Below the cam in this photo (hidden) is a spring-loaded lever that pushes against a pin on the cam. On the upper edge of the cam, as shown, is a little projection that engages the release lever, which is at the lowest part of the image; it's an irregular shape.

When a key is pressed down, it moves the release lever and unlatches the cam for that letter; the spring-loaded lever pressing on the pin rotates the cam until it engages the power roll. As the cam continues to turn, increasing radius rotates the cam's frame slightly (clockwise in the photo) to operate the typing linkage for that character.

As the cam continues to rotate, the spring-loaded lever pushes on the pin to move it toward home position, but if the key is still down, the cam (now out of contact with the power roll) stalls because the projection on the cam catches on another part of the release lever. The cam stalls until the key is released. When released, the lever catches the projection so the cam is now in home position. This is like a simple clock escapement, and prevents repeated typing. (The "key-down" anti-repeat stop can be removed, so that fast repetitive typing can be done, but this change is difficult to undo.)

Carriage return was done by a non-stretch very durable textile tape attached to the platen advance mechanism at the left of the carriage. For a return, the tape wound up on a small reel operated from the drive system through a clutch.
A cam engaged the clutch; it was disengaged by the left margin stop, perhaps directly, perhaps via another cam. (Info. needed here!) A light-torque spring kept the return tape wound on the reel.
The basic mechanism looks just like an IBM electric typewriter from the late 1940s. In fact, some Flexowriter parts are identical in fit and function to the early IBM electric typewriters (those with rotary carriage escapements, a gear-driven power roll, and a governor-controlled variable speed "universal" (wound-rotor/commutator) motor.)

The early IBM rotary-escapement proportional-spacing typewriters (three wheel rotary escapement, spur gear differentials) had code bars to control the amount of carriage movement for the current character. They were operated by the cams. However, the Flexowriter's mechanical encoder was a very different and far more rugged design, although still operated by the cams.
Flexowriters (at least those prior to 1969) do not have transistor

Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...

s; electrical control operations were done with telephone-style (E-Class) relay

Relay

A relay is an electrically operated switch. Many relays use an electromagnet to operate a switching mechanism mechanically, but other operating principles are also used. Relays are used where it is necessary to control a circuit by a low-power signal , or where several circuits must be controlled...

s, and troubleshooting often involved problems with the timing on the relays. Another reader has also found that the timing settings of the various leaf switches (such as in the tape reader) are also important.

The screws used in the Flexowriter were unique, having large flat heads with a very narrow screwdriver slot and a unique thread size and pitch. This may have been a conscious decision. Another reader found that standard 4-40UNC threads appear to fit some of the cover-attachments; internally, the headless set-screws require fluted Bristol keys, which are not commonly available in Great Britain.

There is a holder for a large roll of paper tape on the back of the unit, with tape feeding around to a punch on the left side, toward the rear. The tape reader is on the same side, toward the front, and is essentially identical to the reader shown on the front of the square housing in the photo of the auxiliary reader. The right side of a Flexowriter has a large (~1") connector for hooking the unit up to computers and other equipment. Depending on the model, this connector may be wired in many different ways.

At various times and in various configurations, flexos came with 5, 6, 7 or 8 channel paper tape reader/punches, could have several auxiliary paper tape units attached, and could also attach to IBM punched card equipment.

Flexowriters today

There is (as of 2005) an Electromatic on display at the Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

 and (as of late 2006) a Flexowriter at the Boston Museum of Science, in the gallery overlooking the large Van de Graaff generator. In Great Britain, in a private residence in North London, a Model 1 SPD (Systems Programatic Double-case) has been kept operational from 1978 to the present day (2008) and its owner welcomes E-mails to cgmm2@btinternet.com . There are further Flexowriters at the computer museums of the University of Amsterdam and the University of Stuttgart. The French computer museum (Musée de l'Informatique) owns two FlexoWriter which have been used by SEA CAB 500.

External links

• Photos and history Retrieved April 10, 2007
• Discussion of Flexowriter code conversion with link to code chart
• Flexowriter patent
• Firearms code markings, including note of CCC produced M-1s.
• Description of Justowriter Also discusses Blodgett