this evening, the rachel maddow
show starts now.
early for a change.
>> i have something to spend
this time doing.
>> exactly.
>> thanks, my friend, appreciate
it.
thanks to you at home for
joining us this hour.
very happy to have you here
tonight.
who here is old enough to have
ever used a typewriter?
i took typing class and it was
on a typewriter.
i'm that old.
typewriters started off with a
mechanism that looked like this.
you pressed a button on a
keyboard for a specific letter,
but then a little arm, a little
bar would swing up from the guts
of the keyboard and smack that
letter into the inked typewriter
ribbon, and thereby pressed the
imprint of that letter on to the
paper, right?
so that was the mechanism.
each keystroke on the typewriter
would cause a piece of metal to
fling itself up toward the
paper.
a different little bar with a
different letter on it for each
keystroke.
that was how they started out.
but then in 1961, ibm changed
all of that.
ibm invented a whole new kind...