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--- On Sun, 12/7/08, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:

> Back in my typewriter days, which ended in 1988 or
> thereabouts I fudged up an entire retransliteration
> of the IPA using overstrike characters and the likewise
> handy device of rolling the cylinder up/down a single
> notch to place periods and commas above and below
> letters, not to mention the sub- and superscript
> numbers beloved by philologists (H_1-4, e^2 etc.).
Back in the 1960's, while I had no use for linguistic symbols, I did need a lot of
mathematical symbols, Greek alphabet, and the like in what I typed. I had a
portable, manual Smith Corona typewriter that had two keys with changeable
type. I had a large box full of little snap-lid plastic boxes, each box with a
little clip-on type head that hooked onto either of the two changeable keys.
Each type head came with a little key-chip that snapped onto the key itself,
showing the graphic representation of whatever symbol was installed on that
key.

Using shift, I could have up to four different special characters at a time on the
keyboard. If I needed more, I could stop typing, swap in a new special
character, type it, and keep right on going. It was very cool.

--gary

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