At a HardOff I caught a glimpse of an oldschool Japanese mechanical typewriter. The Nippon Type PanWriter types in 3 colours and somehow impacts one of the over 2300 glyphs onto the paper after the user manually slides over the rows & columns and presses down to type it. (Zoom in for the details)

November 24, 2025 - 02:09 UTC

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@riversidewings.bsky.social
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you sent me down a rabbit hole on this one.

apparently the way this thing works is the lever arm is like a two-axis pointer, but it corresponds directly to a tray of lettersets. The lever action plucks the selected character out of the tray and plonks it up onto the roller and somehow puts it back
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The basic concept was patented in 1917!
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Horrifying. I love it.
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That's incredibly cool.
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Reminds me of this recent article - the embedded YouTube video has a demonstration of the above type of keyboard, and an even more diabolical one.

hackaday.com/2025/11/03/reproduced-and-recovered-the-first-chinese-keyboard-based-mingkwai-typewriter/
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