ASCII art (in slightly different form) was around before the 1990s.
Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)
When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.
C1 wasn't Windows compatible at first, and this one doesn't come with desktop Windows software (only Mac software), if you read the fine print. Something to note.
I have happy memories of Dad driving me home from Hebrew school Sundays and hearing those beeps on CBC radio...then the pregnant pause, then the longer beep and the news. Definitely a weekly ritual.
A book, but you may find useful to be able to write short texts in Braille also so you can fix embossed tags and notes in parts of the house to help when you aren't around.
TeX/LaTeX can write braille (that you can later print with a braille printer).
I worked as a secretary in a brokerage firm in 1987. They had electronic typewriters with name/address storage and mail merge functionality. I'm sure PCs must've come in only a few years later, but it was definitely possible before then.
IBM selectrics were essentially word processors. The input and output made an easy transition into the current office environment. Paper and a rollerball was far superior to any printer or monitor I saw in those days.
Earlier Selectrics were completely electromechanical, with no storage or word processing features. They were just electric typewriters with a different mechanism. I learned to type on one in high school, the summer before taking my first programming course, when they were still teaching typing on electric typewriters and there were about eight terminals total on the campus PDP-11.
The Selectric wasn't the only single-element typewriter design. There was also a Triumph-Adler design which used a cylindrical type element instead of a ball.
Thank you, I think the Selectric is a pretty interesting device. Your story makes it sound like the role earlier filled by the Friden Flexowriter. I imagine it was pretty easy for the Selectric to out do the Flexowriter for most things and the output could be easily duplicated at a certain point.
Flexowriter was VERY before my time. State-of-the-art circa 1980 was the DEC LA120 (DECWriter III), a dot-matrix printing terminal with a logic-seeking printhead that absolutely smoked the neighboring LA36.
There were Selectrics set up as terminals, though, as the mechanism was well-suited for it. I think IBM called it a 2741. I never saw such a beast, though.
All that was needed to make a Selectric into a terminal was essentially a box to take the electrical signals of hitting the keys (that triggered the correct letter on the ball to strike the ribbon) and amplify/send them to an interface into a device that could take TTY. Early word-processors and cold-type machines used this since those Selectrics were ubiquitous and dang durable.
these were mini but to be honest i stopped reading them after i found hacker news. memeorandum became addictive for me because i could go there any minute of the day and see new and depressing doom and gloom, but it only ever feels reflective of the last 24 hours of the news cycle. i'd love a memeorandum that was only published weekly or even monthly.
Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)
When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.
(1) https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-as...