I have often eyed typewriters at garage sales and thought it would be fun to try one out. Often the thing that held me back was not knowing if it would work and the price. I recently stumbled on a Smith Corona XE 5200 typewriter being sold for $2. After seeing that it worked, I decided to take the plunge.

This was no ordinary manual typewriter. It came out when computers were starting to take hold of the word processing world. It has a 5000 word memory bank and a built in dictionary. I had fun running it through the demo and this is what it typed out.

While I appreciate the versatility of a typewriter (for example I addressed a few envelopes with it), I don’t think that it will be replacing my computer. However, it has been really fun learning how to use it and there are still many more functions listed in the manual that I could still make use of.