This was an 85 pound cast iron electric typewriter with hundreds of moving parts, a dozen electric relays, a paper tape punch (chadless!) and a tape reader. While you might think this was a device only the government would buy, it was widely used in business to write form letters and in factories to control industrial machine tools. Newspapers used flexowriters to control their typesetting machines.The navy bought this as an input/output device for the painfully slow NAVDAC computer, to which it was connected with an 80 pin cable connector. Where was USB when we needed it? The duty oceanographer in survey control took his geographic position information from a flexowriter next to the chart table.
During the fall of 1962 I spent two months at the Friden training school in Rochester, NY learning about the machine. We took a flexowriter apart, then reassembled it, under the assumption that this would teach a person how to repair it. In practice the most common problems were worn out platen rollers and jammed keys. It required frequent ribbon changes as well. The navy bought a stripped down version that printed in upper case only, but it still was heavy as hell. Our flexowriters had pin feed platens to handle continuous form paper.
