magnetic media. IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) in 1964. In October, 1968, Information Control Systems introduced the Astrotype word processing system. Both of these used magnetic tape and Selectric print mechanisms. With its fixed type font and paper-tape recording medium, the Flexowriter had difficulty competing with these machines, although some Flexowriter documentation emphasized the fact that, unlike IBM's MT/ST tapes, Flexowriter users could cut and splice paper tapes, particularly if they could recognize some of the common codes such as carriage return. The Diablo daisy wheel printer, introduced in 1969, offered comparable print quality at twice the speed. Larger manufacturers such as IBM and DEC made their own console equipment, and video terminals began to appear, displacing paper-based systems. Eventually, even the CNC machine tool industry abandoned paper tape, although this was significantly slower because of the long working life of machine tools. Applications Automatic typewriters From its earliest days through to at least the mid-1960s, Flexowriters were used as automatic letter writers. While the US White House was using them during the Second World War, in the 1960s, United States Members of Congress used Flexowriters extensively to handle enormous volumes of routine correspondence with constituents; an advantage of this method was that these letters appeared to have been individually typed by hand. These were complemented by autopen machines which could use a pen to place a signature on letters making them appear to have been hand-signed. Auxiliary paper-tape readers could be attached to a Flexowriter to create an early form of "mail merge", where a long custom-created tape containing individual addresses and salutations was merged with a closed-loop form-letter and printed on continuous-form letterhead; both tapes contained embedded "control characters" to switch between readers. Console terminals As the unit record equipment (tabulating machine) industry matured and became the computer industry, Flexowriters were commonly used as console terminals for computers. Because ASCII character coding had not yet been standardized, each type of computer tended to use its own system for encoding characters; Flexowriters were capable of being configured with numerous encodings particular to the computer system the machine was being used with. Computers that used Flexowriters as consoles include: The Electromatic on the Harvard Mark I The MIT Whirlwind I computer, first designed to control a flight simulator, and later becoming the basis of the SAGE network. The Lincoln Laboratory TX-0, an early experimental transistor-based minicomputer, which