Arne Lange10 Mar 2015, 16:23:00Thanks a lot for this article. I am looking forward to part 2! Olympia portables are my favourites.There is some interesting history behind the Colortip rebranding. Those typewriters were primarily sold by agents door by door, resulting in quite some scandals. The company that ended being renamed Colortip was run by Josef Haid, who at times ran a network of more than 4000 agents. Their practice was to sell contracts for typewriter telecourses - only that those contracts had a hidden clause that included the purchase of a typewriter. Different brands were involved over the years (Alpina typewriters also made some sales over this route). If you trust google translate, this German article from that time would be quite interesting: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45140285.htmlWhat I find especially interesting about the Colortip machines is that there should be some modified later versions of Olympis SMs, that allowed to lock certain keys to make learning to type easier. As far as I know, they have an extra lever, that has three settings: program (lock all keys that are subsequently used), type (only the keys not locked before would budge) and reset. This lever would be unter the spool cover close to the left spool. I have been looking for those, but haven't found one yet. Also there is not much info to find about those....

Even with keyring pliers and the skill to use them, the blackout paper method is a lengthy one.

These were sometimes used to assist in the learning of touch typing. Clients would have their local repair person install these little black paper circles to cover the letters so they wouldn't be tempted to stare at the keyboard. Fairly rare, I've not seen them used on any of the 500+ machines I've serviced in the past 7 or so years. There were also dedicated blank caps designed to go over the keytops that were used, those are much more common than the blackout paper method.

Full alphabet sentences, also called pangrams, were used to check the function of all letters on the typewriter keyboard. They were also used in typing lessons.