Ford Typewriter Ford Typewriter The Ford typewriter was an early prototype typewriter introduced in 1895 by Eugene A. Ford, who later became chief development engineer at IBM (no relation to Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company). It was a commercial failure and only a few were manufactured. Unlike many competing typewriters of this time, it was a forward-striking machine, meaning the hammer struck forward against the paper which was held against the platen roller, instead of up from underneath. This allowed the typist to see the text as it was typed, which was not possible in most other typewriters of
Not a typewriter failure, the leftover ENOTTY will result in an utterly inappropriate "Not a typewriter" (or "Not a teletype", or "Inappropriate ioctl for device") being delivered to the user. For many years the UNIX mail program sendmail contained this bug: when mail was delivered from another system, the mail program was being run non-interactively. If the destination address was local, but referred to a user name not found in the local password file, the message sent back to the originator of the email was the announcement that the person they were attempting to communicate with was not a typewriter. Not a typewriter