Olympia Report Deluxe - A retro work of beauty!

I love this article. I started apprenticing for my dad repairing typewriters at his store, New Ulm Office Machines, at the age of twelve. I cleaned and repaired a bunch of different typewriters both new and old. We serviced Smith Corona, Olympia, Olivetti, Remington, Underwood, and probably a number of others that I can't remember. We were an authorized Olympia typewriter reseller and sold the Report Deluxe, which my dad gave me as a high school graduation gift. Steven Levy, writer for Wired, posted this article for Gizmodo's retro series online:

In 1979, I wrote all my stories to the accompaniment of a grating hum, which sometimes modulated to a low growl. These, along with the greased metallic Gatling-gun clicks that punched out my prose character by character, were the sounds of my Olympia Report deLuxe typewriter .

Compared to using a word processor on a PC, using the ORD was an earthy process: Hands-on ribbon changes, the smell of ink, and cranking the platen to see what you just typed. Not to mention an unforgiving process--all too often I was faced with the option of swabbing Wite-Out on a typo or an infelicitous phrase, or simply using a pen to cross it out and scrawl a correction in the blank line between double space. But in 1979, an electric typewriter was the tool of choice, and my was the Olympia.

via Gizmodo Juicer Hub.