The Brother EP-22 electronic printer was a pretty neat gadget at the time of its release, but not so much now.
Back in 1983, its predecessor, the EP-20 (and what was then “the soon to be released” EP-22) garnered a positive review in a New York Times article that was syndicated in various American newspapers.
Brother itself was loathe to refer to these machines as “typewriters” but that’s how they tended to be described in the press. “New portable clicks while flying” published in the South Bend Tribune, Indiana, on October the 10th 1983, is just one example:
NEW YORK– “John Mariani is trying out this typewriter with the intention of taking it in an airplane to work with as he sees fit.” Mariani, a writer, types those words last week as he tried out a very thin five-pound portable electronic typwriter at a New York camera outlet.
He was preparing to leave on an eight-hour trans-Atlantic flight and he wanted to work en-route. “The reason one buys a machine of this kind,” he wrote as he tried the machine, “is to be able to type while on a plane or train or any conveyance, whereby you must do something quite silently.”
The typewriter’s dimensions are 12x7x1 1/2 inches. The salesman explained how to set margins and correct errors and how to use the built-in calculator. The author asked about prospects of the printer’s obsolescence, the availability of replacements for its ribbon cartridge and the cartridge’s price. The salesman said that a new model was just about to come out on the market that was capable of being connected with a computer. The writer pondered the issue some more and then said: “Why should I wait for a new one when I don’t have the computer to tie it into? But don’t tell my wife there’s a new one coming out.”
Mariani bought the typewriter.
“The relatively simple Brother EP 20, which has been on the market for nine months, will be joined by the more sophisticated EP 22 (with a suggested retail price of $349), which can be used as a printer connected with a computer. Silver Reed is also producing its own lightweight portable, which in a month will be available by mail order.
The portable, which is technically a printer with small dots forming the letters, is designed as a rough draft machine. According to David Lammerding, a marketing associate for Brother International Corp, students using it for note-taking in the classroom or library are a primary target market.”
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