Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  Someone sent me a link to a Web site showing an old typewriter, a manual typewriter, hooked up to a Macintosh screen.  It’s called a USB typewriter.  It’s not a real device.  Honest, it’s not a real device.  There's no paper in the typewriter, of course, although, theoretically, you could use it as a printer, if such a thing were hooked up.  But there is no electronic way of doing it.

It was the IBM Selectric.  If anybody remembers the old IBM Selectric, that was the first machine that when you hit the key it actually sent a signal to the device, the mechanism that selected the character and then impacted through the ribbon onto the paper.  That's why they were able to hook it up to a magnetic recording device and create desktop publishing, the MTST, if you would, Magnetic Tape Selectric typewriter.  That was the first time anybody ever did that.  But your problem with manual typewriters, of course, was that it was all mechanical.  You hit the key and through a series of levers, the mechanism impacts with the ribbon onto the paper.  So this is a fun video, the USB typewriter.  You can search it on Google and find it.  It’s fun to watch, but does not really exist. 

I saw another demonstration of a rollup computer.  You carry this over your shoulder and then you unwind it and it comes down and it sets up and there's screen and there's actually a little keyboard.  Oh and another little piece comes up and becomes an antenna, so you can connect to the Internet.  So we’re going back to the scroll.  There we are.  The scroll computer, if you will.  

Now, if you can combine the scroll computer and the USB typewriter, I don't know what you’d get, but it would certainly be very interesting.  In any case, that's my opinion.