pdxtypewriter wrote:

The typewriter of my youth was the classic 12. My memories of it are as a work horse--I beat the hell out of it and had it from 1968 well into the 80s before it was displaced by computers.  Wrote plays, scripts, stories, college papers-- loved it. 

I also remember the SC Classic 12 or something very much like it as a working typewriter when typewriters simply worked - though my oeuvre was limited to term papers. Rather than blur it with the mists of nostalgia the effect is to make it look like something out of the back of a closet which needs to be donated to the thrift shop. I simply cannot go gaga it. As for the action my opinion would be tainted by a gradual settling on full sized office machines as something I might actually like to use today - inconceivable at that time. Every house had a typewriter, and the typewriter looked like a portable Smith Corona!

(I thought about moving this to Portable Typewriters but I'll leave this to the moderator)

pdxtypewriter wrote:

The typewriter of my youth was the classic 12.
... snip ...
So, I thought I'd put it to the hive mind:  as 60s machines go, how does the classic 12 stack up? 

Smith-Coronas of the early- to mid-sixties, including the Classic 12, stack up very well compared to their competition. Every one that I have encountered that was not actually damaged performs very well. And that rounded metal case that most of them came with is my favorite case design. Of the common portables of the 1960s, the Smith-Coronas and the Olympias are my favorites. It shouldn't be hard to find a clean example of a Classic 12. Have Fun!

I think very highly of the Classic 12 also. Mine came from a dumpster dive -- I was buying a couple of cameras from Craigslist and asked the guy (who was clearing out his father's house) if he had any typewriters: "I just threw one in the dumpster yesterday!" It was upside down, no case, but it was in the plastic cover that had obviously accompanied it for years.

(At one point that evening I noticed that the nameplate had fallen off -- probably in the dumpster somewhere -- and I bummed out a fair bit. Then some of the keys stopped working and I really was unhappy. But you guessed it, there was the nameplate jammed down in the key linkages, a little the worse for wear!)

Works great, and even the ribbon has some life in it. I'd love to get a case for it -- certainly there should be enough of them out there. (Anyone have a spare?)

As Uwe said, these machines are not the acme, but they are darn nice to use and the styling has held up well too. Mine is an early version, I think -- the tab set and clear is a rocker switch on the right, rather than the setup Uwe shows. It, and the two swappable typeslug keys, are in a nice rich red that matches the name badge. It does not have the Power Space bar.

Tracing the history and features of the various SCM machines of the '60s-'70s is probably pretty confusing, since it seems as though there wasn't that much difference among the models, and (like Detroit cars of the same period) they kept changing them year after year.