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Ahh Olivetti.
I learned typing on a beautiful black Olivetti typewriter in highschool in 1982. The whole class was full with typewriters, 2 hours a week. We first had to do finger excersises with our arms up, and then we could begin. All those ping sounds of the typewriters.
My parents bough a portable typewriter but it was not the same and nice as the Olivetti’s.
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They seemed to be unstoppable, the Apple of Europe and also reminds me of Xerox Parc and the early experiments they did there. I love old power stations for some reason, my father worked on turbines at Vickers so maybe I still have his engines.
Yes I remember them as a premium brand. There a was mixture of brands in the typewriter classroom, both manual and electric, with the idea of being able use both when encountered on the job. An interesting side of the class was learning the form and composition of various business letters. My first job included typing up business letters to accompany mechanical engineering job bids along with making copies of the blueprints.
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I am only 42 but I have had some weird jobs; one of the more interesting ones was typing a lawyer’s correspondence on his typewriter for him. He had a little office above a bank. I guess I was in high school. Don’t recall the brand of the machine but it was pretty cool. Only a temp job.
I have a manual typewriter at home I used to write poetry and short stories on. Instant printing! lol
My mom was nice enough to refurbish it and gift it for my birthday one year. I believe it’s a Smith Corona. Has it’s own little case. I got 2 new ribbons for it off ebay or maybe Amazon i cant remember, a few years or so ago. 
They make all sorts of vintage refill stuff in China .
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… Aaahhh the glories of Elite.
I purchased my first typewriter when I was about eight years old (about 1961) by selling garden and flower seeds. Once the seeds were sold (mostly to family and friends of the family) the deal was to return the money and you could purchase a prize. I choose a typewriter. When it arrived it was a metal box that only looked like a typewriter. 
it did not type… hard to believe scammers did that to kids who probably didn’t read the fine print or maybe was none! Later in life learned to get my cut in dollars, not silly prizes.
I remember the portable Smith-Corona typewriters in a case.
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oh no!! Was this ‘typewriter’ from a mail order ad in the back of a magazine? That’s terrible.
That is societal decay right there.
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Right next to the X-ray specs…Denied!
Miss being a kid. Oh, the thinks you can think…
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Lol. The art of deception, doesn’t claim they are the actual items one would receive… didn’t Trump shut down the consumer protection agency🤭
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I was in college in Ann Arbor right after the Detroit riots. A class in environmental studies went to Detroit to see what HUD did to the city. In an effort to prevent any future riots, our government went through the historic districts filled with former steel and auto workers out of jobs, who had been angry as hell at being treated like dirt on a very hot summer night when police broke into a Blind Pig (illegal bar- Blacks weren’t given liquor licenses) and destroyed it. That was the start of the riot. HUD condemned houses on every other street, moved the occupants to different neighborhoods all over the suburban areas and ruined years of community organization/churches/ etc. The corporations had already been taken over by the Communists who moved manufacturing out of the US and it left the city in the situation that you see today.
My sister lived in a house with a ball room on the third floor, one block from where Aretha Franklin lived, in one of the older areas with a divided roadway, parklike down the middle. A crack house was next door. An absolute tragedy.
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A blight on the landscape, or so it seemed… Then it became a beacon of hope and change. I visited in 2010, I did the usual tourist thing but I saw a city that had real potential. Yes, there are amazing ruins to be explored, Packard, 8 mile bridge, The Heidelberg project. But that is just stuff a tourist does, a show home for a city in dire need of massive federal investment. Detroit is a hidden treasure, in dire need of life support and with incredible potential. We will see if Trump really cares about the people that built this city, and how he treats them will be a bellweather for how MAGA really plays out.
I recall watching some home improvement show ten years ago where they renovated one of those large Detroit homes. My, my, what beautiful bones the house and neighborhood had. The area must have been impressive in the 50’s.
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I learned typing in high school. Then for college, I got a slim, lightweight, mint green Swiss Hermes Rocket. It was a graduation gift and I used it to do my whole senior thesis, together with hand-drawn illustrations (got an A+!). I sometimes wish I’d kept it since it was so easy to use and carry. Had to be a good typist as well as speller since there was no auto-correct!
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I never heard of that brand, those are nice machines:
https://www.typewritertechs.com/typewriters_for_sale/hermes_typewriters.html
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