Followers of my social media might be aware that I’m presently working on a project concerning the history of educational technology and its consequences for the perceived cultural and discursive connection between disability and the mechanical. Part of this work centers on a series of experiments carried out using the Edison Responsive Environment, perhaps better known as the “Talking Typewriter. While I’ve been working on this project, I’ve discovered a few curiosities that likely won’t make it into any paper that emerges from my research, but nevertheless captivate me sufficiently to cause me to write about them. Thus, I’m going to be posting some brief notes about some of these tangents, because I suspect I’m not the only one who might find them interesting. These are sketches, perhaps ramblings, but certainly not fully developed thoughts.
One of these tangents is the process by which the ERE was programmed; while the hardware aspects of the ERE are well documented (see Lockett, 2019 for a contemporary treatment) the specifics of developing ERE software deserve attention in part because it offers a window into how, before the emergence of standardized means, we set about constructing machines for personal computing.
Continue reading “Research Aside: How do you make a typewriter talk?”