High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces of cast metal type (called sorts) used in movable type letterpress printing. From their invention in 1868 through much of the 20th century, typewriters were indispensable tools for recording the written word. Widely used by professional writers and in offices for decades, by the end of the 1980s, word processors and personal computers largely displaced typewriters in the settings where they previously had been ubiquitous in the western world.