From 1933 to 1990, IBM manufactured and sold office machinery in addition to its major products--punched card machinery and computers. This book is a nostalgic history of IBM’s always subordinate Electric Typewriter Division (later the Office Products Division, OPD), which was called the Romance Division because its male salesmen were selling products used by secretaries and typists, at first almost all young females. The division’s most successful products were an increasingly capable line of electric typewriters, to which were added several lines of much less successful dictation machines and copiers. In the later part of the life of the division, the typewriters used cards and magnetic tape, had some internal memory, and became rudimentary word processors. After years of failure to create and sell office products that would be as financially rewarding as computers, IBM first disbanded the OPD in 1982 and finally sold its assets in 1990 for about $2.3 billion to an investment group that, a year later, became Lexmark International.

The authors were longtime sales management employees of the division and have written a warm history of the strategies, products, and especially the key people involved. All the products are named and described, and many are pictured. The various strategies adopted are described and often illustrated with anecdotal stories. Although the authors claim that the marketing strategies of the division played an important role in the creation of today’s office systems and office automation industry, this claim is not borne out by the facts and chronology recited. Instead, the division’s history appears to be an extended example, after the advent of the Selectric Typewriter, of IBM’s unfortunate characteristic of never being first with a market-dominating product, and in too many OPD cases, not having a product of above-average performance.

The book will be of interest to students of IBM and its ways, for it tells a story of a part of IBM that is ignored by histories of the company’s computer successes. It shows that IBM sales methods could not sustain a business with an inadequate product, and how long it took the firm, in spite of its vaunted ability to see the future, to recognize that the OPD was unable to cope with the rapidly changing office environment--change brought about by IBM itself with its computers and especially by its computer competitors.