A
Braille typewriter.
The Perkins brailler I recently bought as part of an odd lot exemplifies the classic design and durability of the 1950s. You wind a piece of paper around an internal cylinder, then spool it out through a print head consisting of two flat plates with six pins embedded in the bottom plate.
It's a chording keyboard, so you press down on one to six keys at the same time to form the dots for one cell. There's a space bar in the center, and three dot keys on either side. To the far right is a backspace key, and on the far left is a line feed key.
When the entire page has been typed out, a spring holds the bottom edge so that the paper doesn't fall out of the machine.
Now if only I could think of something to do with this beautiful piece of hardware...