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> Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all

Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.

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> I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward

This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.

Dead keys unfortunately cannot be used for shortcuts. This has caused a lot of issues when I was using local kb layout. Especially problematic are programs that don't support remapping of shortcuts.

> or there was a separate key to move the same space back

And that key was called Backspace.

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