Daniel Ross' NVictria Is a Steampunk Teletype Terminal Blending Typewriters 80 Years Apart
This "Victorian Teletype" would look right at home in any self-respecting mad scientist's laboratory — yet is also entirely functional.
Vintage technology enthusiast Daniel Ross has taken two typewriters built 80 years apart and blended them together to form a "Victorian Teletype" dubbed the NVictria.
"This is a mash-up of a 1903 and a 1988 typewriters. They become my version of a teletype and steampunk printer," Ross explains of the NVictria project, named for Invictus and Victoria. "The Remington #7, a 1903 typewriter, I'm guessing was in some sort of fire, was covered in soot, water damaged, rusty, and seized. The other typewriter [is] a Sharp PA-3000 electronic daisy wheel circa 1988."
The Sharp, a device from an era when you no longer hand to hammer down hard on the keys to move physical hammers by brute force alone, was handily already capable of communicating over a serial link with external hardware — either acting as a simple printer or as an interactive teletype terminal, sending typed input to the remote computer and printing its responses on paper.
The Remington, however, was not — a short-sighted failure to predict the growth of computing technology on the manufacturer's part, despite being made eighty years after Charles Babbage proposed the Difference Engine.
"I stripped down the Remington to the framework and started to convert, meld, form, modify, curse, swear, rebuild, strip down again and again over a period of a year...ish," Ross explains. The project didn't just stop at putting a functional teletype terminal in a mechanical typewriter from 1903, though: Ross added individually-addressable LEDs under each key cap, a swing-out display, and even a speech synthesis function, while using many of the original Sharp components on a new custom PCB.
Videos walking through the project's history are available on Ross' YouTube channel, with more information on his Hackaday.io page.
