[derefr]

“Real typewriters”, for much of their lives, were mostly write-only devices. You didn’t interactively edit with a typewriter; you drafted—typing something out without really being able to see the result very well, except when you get a paragraph or so further along—and then, when you were done, you’d pull the sheet out, write editing marks on it (or your editor would), and then you (or a typist) would take the sheet+editing marks and transcribe the result through another typewriter, to get a cleaned result. (Any mistakes made during transcribing would result in starting over on transcribing that sheet. Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out ribbon, and the result was just heading for a fax machine anyway.)

Really, it was a major revolution when the first word processors came ‘round, and you got a little LCD display one-line buffer, that you could commit to the paper or re-write.

[slantyyz]

> were mostly write-only devices.

True.

In the mid eighties though, there were electronic daisy-wheel typewriters (I don't consider those to be word processors in the same vein as the Wang word processors that had full green screens) that had one line LCD screens that would let you edit the line before imprinting it onto the paper.

On a side note, remember how "letter quality" was considered a thing back then, because dot matrix printers could only achieve "near-letter-quality"? Those terms aren't even in today's vernacular.

> Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out ribbon,

Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

[derefr]

> Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional typist, often the process of handling manual white-out taping (followed by re-feeding/aligning the sheet to its previous position) would be slower than just re-typing the entire page! The secondary white-out ribbons were the only thing I saw used in practice (by anyone other than slow-as-molasses government bureaucracies), because they didn’t require re-feeding the paper.

[slantyyz]

> True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional typist...

I tend to think business users at the time had the fancy typewriters or word processors, while home/student users were limited to whatever correction tools they could afford.

As a student, prior to getting a dot matrix printer, I would use either liquid paper or those powdered correction sheets to fix typos.