May 9, 2026
Typewriter tea hits the fan
Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023)
Old IBM ‘golf ball’ fonts are back, and the comments are pure typewriter chaos
TLDR: A designer revived the look of the IBM Selectric Composer, a 1960s typewriter that made typed pages look unusually polished by using interchangeable “golf ball” heads and carefully planned letter widths. Commenters were torn between awe at the machine’s mechanical genius, nostalgia overload, and a surprise side-fight about forged documents and Microsoft Word.
A designer has brought the IBM Selectric Composer look back to life, digging through old catalogues and doing a frankly wild amount of width math to recreate the fonts from one of the fanciest typewriters of the 1960s. This wasn’t your average clacky office machine: it used those famous interchangeable “golf ball” heads and could fake near-printing-press quality by giving different letters different widths. In plain English, it made typed pages look shockingly elegant for something fully mechanical.
But the real show is the comment section, where readers instantly split into two camps: awed nerds and nostalgia goblins. One crowd is absolutely swooning over the machine’s “crazy design,” calling the spinning ball mechanism a mechanical miracle and sharing videos just to watch it dance. Another wave of commenters turned the whole thing into a memory lane special, with one person confessing they used to treat the precious type balls like backyard toys because their engineer dad kept a drawer full of them. Iconic behavior.
Then came the spicy history detour: one commenter dragged the Selectric into the infamous Killian documents forgery debate, arguing that even this advanced typewriter couldn’t reproduce some of the too-perfect formatting people got from Microsoft Word. So yes, what started as a font revival post became a mini courtroom drama about old documents, fake typography, and whether modern software accidentally snitched on a forgery. Meanwhile, former print workers chimed in with tales of manually justifying lines twice, basically reminding everyone that beautiful pages once required patience bordering on sainthood.
Key Points
- •The article argues that reviving IBM Selectric Composer typefaces requires first understanding the machine’s mathematical spacing and scaling system.
- •IBM’s 1964 Selectric Composer used seven proportional spacing groups and three color-coded scaling settings rather than monospaced typewriter spacing.
- •IBM catalogues recorded each type element’s color code and cap height; some nominal font sizes shared identical set widths because they used the same unit setting.
- •The Composer’s interchangeable type elements, or “golf balls,” were nickel-plated plastic components weighing 9 grams and made to high precision.
- •Adrian Frutiger’s attempt to adapt Univers to IBM’s fixed 9-unit scheme revealed that the company’s universal width assignments, based on Times-like proportions, did not match many modern typefaces.