Arne Lange10 Mar 2015, 16:23:00Thanks a lot for this article. I am looking forward to part 2! Olympia portables are my favourites.There is some interesting history behind the Colortip rebranding. Those typewriters were primarily sold by agents door by door, resulting in quite some scandals. The company that ended being renamed Colortip was run by Josef Haid, who at times ran a network of more than 4000 agents. Their practice was to sell contracts for typewriter telecourses - only that those contracts had a hidden clause that included the purchase of a typewriter. Different brands were involved over the years (Alpina typewriters also made some sales over this route). If you trust google translate, this German article from that time would be quite interesting: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45140285.htmlWhat I find especially interesting about the Colortip machines is that there should be some modified later versions of Olympis SMs, that allowed to lock certain keys to make learning to type easier. As far as I know, they have an extra lever, that has three settings: program (lock all keys that are subsequently used), type (only the keys not locked before would budge) and reset. This lever would be unter the spool cover close to the left spool. I have been looking for those, but haven't found one yet. Also there is not much info to find about those....