Toasted Dolphin

The Barbie Typewriter E-118, (the original Mehano E-115 typewriter shown) is a low-cost electronic typewriter, developed as a childeren's toy by Mehano in Slovenia (formerly: Yugoslavia) and sold worldwide by Mattel (US). The E-118 is the latest model in the product line that started with the E-115. The electronic typewriter was the successor to the earlier purely mechanical Barbie typewriter models.

It is little known that all electronic variants have a hidden built-in cryptographic capability that allows secret writing.

It uses a mono alphabet substitution cipher, also known as MASC.

Apart from a range of typesetting features, such as letter-spacing and underline, this children's toy was capable of encoding and decoding secret messages, using one of 4 built-in cipher modes. These modes were activated by entering a special key sequence on the keyboard, and was explained only in the original documentation.

When the E-115 was adopted by Mattel as an addition to the Barbie™ product line, it was aimed mainly at girls with a minimum age of 5 years. For this reason the product was given a pink-and-purple case and the Barbie logo and image were printed on the body. As it was probably thought that secret writing would not appeal to girls, the coding/decoding facilities were omitted from the manual. Nevertheless, these facilities can still be accessed if you know how to activate them.

Link to CryptoMuseum

Substitution tables

Standard characters
Code abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
1    icolapxstvybjeruknfhqg;dzw >FAUTCYOLVJDZINQKSEHG<.1PB 523406789-
2    torbiudfhgzcvanqyepskx¢1w; RC>GHAPND<VUBLIKJETOYXM2QF 63405789-¨
3    hrnctqlpsxwogiekzaufyd+b;¢ SARYO>QIUX<GFDLJVTHNP1Z3KC 7405689-¨§
4    sneohkbufd;rxtaywiqpzl%c¢+ E>SPNRKLG1XYCUDV<HOIQ2B4JA 805679-¨§£
 
Special characters
Code - ' ! " # % & ( ) * , . ¨ / : ; ? @ ^ _ + < = > ¢ £ § €
1    ¨ _ & m @ : " * ( # W M § ^ , ¢ / ? ! ) % X ' R + € £ =
2    § ) " j ? , m # * @ . Z £ ! W + ^ / & ( : 1 _ S % = € '
3    £ ( m v / W j @ # ? M B € & . % ! ^ " * , 2 ) E : ' = _
4    € * j g ^ . v ? @ / Z F = " N : & ! m # W 3 ( T , _ ' )