IBM Selectric

Instead of a basket of type bars, the Selectric carried a golf-ball-sized element with every character cast on its surface. The ball rotated and tilted to the right character and struck the paper, while the carriage stayed put and the paper advanced — doing away with jamming type bars and letting the machine type very fast. Fonts were changed by lifting out the ball and dropping in another.

The model was an enormous success and dominated offices for over two decades. The mechanism carried into early computer terminals: the IBM 2741 and several remote printers used the Selectric mechanism as their output unit. The daisy wheel and later the dot-matrix printer eventually took over, and the ball became a nostalgic emblem of the electric typewriter era.