This evening, the Rachel Maddow show starts now. Early for a change. I have something to spend this time doing. Exactly. Thanks, my friend, appreciate it. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Very happy to have you here tonight. Who here is old enough to have ever used a typewriter . I took typing class and it was on a typewriter. Im that old. Typewriters started off with a mechanism that looked like this. You pressed a button on a keyboard for a specific letter, but then a little arm, a little bar would swing up from the guts of the keyboard and smack that letter into the inked typewriter ribbon, and thereby pressed the imprint of that letter on to the paper, right . So that was the mechanism. Each keystroke on the typewriter would cause a piece of metal to fling itself up toward the paper. A different little bar with a different letter on it for each keystroke. That was how they started out. But then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. Ibm invented a whole new kind of elect
soviet union invented secret small technology that could be fitted inside an ibm selectric typewriter. and they disguised it really well, so the only way you could find this thing was by x-raying the typewriter and knowing what you were looking for. but what their spying device did inside of a selectric typewriter is that it could detect the movement of little arms and pushrods inside the selectric typewriter that pivoted and rotated that ball as you typed the letters and numbers that you wanted to put on the page. they put a device inside selectrss typewriters that could detect the change. if you were sensitive enough to detect the movements inside that