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The electromechanical mainstay of today's office is being replaced by a softspoken, intelligent electronic typewriter, with a fine memory, too.

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Your biggest problem," warned Connie Barr's new boss when she joined Telephone Management Systems Inc. two years ago, "is going to be creating order out of chaos." Barr was the first marketing-communications manager for the Waltham, Mass. -- based company, which has more than 100 employees. Her job was to find a systematic way to pump out everything from product bulletins to newsletters to user manuals for customers who bought TMS's computerized call accounting systems for tracking telephone usage. The first two manuals Barr worked on took too long to print and cost too much. Then she found a way to do pasteup and typesetting in-house. That gave her better control, produced thoroughly professional-looking materials, and, by her most conservative estimate, let her turn out an average manual in about 25% of the time, at about 75% of the cost, than she could formerly. Barr's solution? She bought a typewriter.

She did not, however, buy that familiar office workhorse, the IBM Selectric. The three machines she eventually acquired for her company belong to a new breed that emerged in 1978 when Olivetti, IBM, and Exxon Enterprises, a division of oil giant Exxon Corp., announced that the typewriter was no longer just a workaday machine. Now, they said, it was electronic and ready to take its place in the office of the future.

What is the difference? The electric -- or, more accurately, electromechanical -- typewriters can do little more than transfer type to paper. The electronic typewriters are "intelligent." They have, in effect, little computers inside and can remember anywhere frorn eight characters to abont 10 pages. Even the lowest priced of these smart typewriters can automatically correct, center, and align numbers at the decimal point. At the high end, they can perform many of the text-editing functions of a word processing system. They range in price from a low of $895 to more than $5,000. Because electronic typewriters can do more than the electric typewriter but cost less than a word processor, many view them as the ideal bridge between the mechanical and electronic eras.

"At first the electronic typewriters were slightly expensive toys for people who wanted to have the newest gadgets lying around the office," says John Derrick, editor and publisher of What to Buy for Business, a monthly report on business equipment and services. But by 1981 those gadgets accounted for 20% of all heavyduty typewriters delivered, a share that could climb to 40% by the end of 1982, according to Clifford Lindsey, a vice-president and director of word processing industry services at Dataquest, a Cupertino, Calif.-based market research company The electronics sold today provide many more features for a lot less money than they did four years ago. And there are many more brands to choose from -- 17 manufacturers are hawking more than 60 models at latest count, and Lindsey expects to see 24 companies in the field by early 1983.

Clearly, buying a typewriter is no longer simple. Cone are the days when your toughest decision was choosing between a sable brown or a marlin blue Selectric. Add to the pot the lowering of prices in word processors and the proliferation of microcomputers with word processing software and you might well ask whether it is still worth buying a typewriter at all.

The answer for most offices is yes. And the typewriter you buy will probably be electronic. In fact, you might not have much choice, according to most analysts Electric typewriters could soon become as rare as Model T's, simply because electronics have become so much easier and cheaper to build.

The electronic typewriter looks pretty much like the electric on the outside. That, in fact, is one of its big selling points. Inside they are about as alike as watermelon and rutabaga. The electric not only has a motor, but it is stuffed with parts -- about 2200 in a Selectric. When you strike a key the motor helps move all the gears, levers, cogs, and pulleys needed to make a letter appear on paper.

The inside of the electronic, however, is almost bare; the machine contains 85% to 90% fewer parts. Electronic typewriters are controlled by tiny microchips mounted on a few circuit boards. Hitting a key sends instructions to a chip, which in turn instructs the print mechanism. These chips not only tell the machine what to do, but are programmed to remember certain functions. With fewer moving parts, the electronics are easier to maintain and lighter in weight than the electric.

Most electronics are also much quieter than electrics. With a couple of exceptions, they don't use the Selectric's familiar single-element printing mechanism -- known by those in typewriter circles as the golfball (a term also used to describe the Selectric itself). Instead they use the much quieter daisy wheel; the characters are on the ends of long stalks arranged around a disk that rotates as you type.

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