IBM Introduced the IBM Selectric® typewriter and I have been wondering what a typewriter — a physical material object — might be in some future. Part of this comes from the experiences of using GitHub Copilot while doing creative writing and seeing what it wants to try and do in terms of continuing trains of thought. It's not quite the same as a typewriter, but it's a kind of writing assistant that is a bit like a ghostwriter. So, I've been thinking about what a typewriter might be like if it were a ghostwriter. This is a sketch of what that might be like. The IBM Selectric was the most successful electric typewriter in history. With its distinctive type element — a spinning, bobbing mechanism often likened to a golf ball — it improved the productivity of typists and the appearance of their work. It offered multiple fonts and multiple alphabets while paving the way for IBM to enter the business of word processors and personal computers decades later. In 1978, IBM held 94% of the market for electric typewriters thanks to the Selectric, which for more than 25 years was the typewriter found on most office desks. For good reason. Despite almost 90 years of modifications and improvements, the average typewriter circa 1960 still employed the same imperfect architecture introduced in 1873. A cylindrical platen, or carriage, moved back and forth, while a nest of type bars, one for each character, was activated by corresponding keys. It was a relatively effective system for getting words on paper, but the type bars would jam when keys were struck in quick succession, and the carriage would often force the paper out of alignment, causing whole rows to fall askew. IBM invested decades of research to overcome these problems, culminating in the introduction of the Selectric in 1961. It replaced individual type bars with 88 characters positioned around the spherical type element, eliminating the jamming issue and the need for a carriage. The Selectric was also the first typewriter to use a typeball, which could be easily swapped out to change fonts. The Selectric II, introduced in 1971, added a correction feature that allowed typists to erase mistakes without using correction fluid or retyping the entire page. The idea of the Ghostwriter is speculative, imagining a possible future or adjacent now in which the idea of the interchangeable typeball is now an interchangeable language model or writing idiom or canon of insights and perspectives that would help a writer develop an idea in their own process through a mechanic of collaboration rather than just telling a chat-based AI to write something for you based on a few prompts or sculpting a story structure. You actually have to type text in order for it to help you.