Hasta La Ideas

So it’s the 1980s and you’re running a company that makes typewriters. Sure, some of your customers are switching over to these new things called computers, but overall business is pretty good, and sales are growing each year.

Then the ’90s hits, more people start using these stupid computers, and business starts to decline. What do you do? Where’s the growth market, or at least the steady market? For New-Jersey-based typewriter manufacturer Swintec, their answer was locked up in U.S. prisons.

At some point in the late ’90s, Swintec realized that a subset of the incarcerated need or want typewriters, to type up their own legal briefs, write correspondance or pass the time doing something productive. Swintec was also presumably aware of the Sony SRF-39FP portable radio, a.k.a. “The iPod of Prison“—the “FP” in the product name stands for Federal Prison, which is why the housing is transparent. Guards can easily inspect it to see if there’s contraband hidden inside.

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