Old printers was Re: What's a "computer console" selectric called?

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Fri May 28 09:37:08 1999

At 11:53 PM 5/27/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
>
>On Fri, 28 May 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
>
>> Don't forget the (totally crazy) ICL Termiprinters. There were at least 4
>> models :
>>
>> These were _strange_ machines. The printing mechanism was that of a
>> band-type line printer. There was a rubber belt that ran round a pulley
>> at each side of the machine Slotted into this belt were metal fingers
>> with the characters on them. And there was a hammer bank to press the
>> character fingers onto the ribbon/paper.
>
>
> Sounds like a re-badged Terminet to me. I had three GE Terminets
>at one time, two ran and one for parts. I had the ASR version with
>the twin cassette ('DataSette') box that functioned like a punch/reader.
>
> FWIW, I have the complete manual sets for these machines, service,
>operation, and reference.
>
> They were a lot of fun and I wish I had kept one. They were
>capable of 300 baud upper and lower case ASCII, and made the neatest
>'rack-rack-rack' sound as the hammers progressed across the paper.
>One could remove and replace the type fingers (which travelled in
>the rubber belt) to get different fonts.

  That all sounds EXACTLY like the printers that Burroughs had when I
worked there in the mid '70s. We called them ODEC printers because they
were made by Ocean Data Electronics Corp. If memory serves they had 100,
200 and 300 LPM models. They could be configured as 64, 96 or 128 character
models by changing the slugs on the band and changing a board inside the
printers. You could also change the font type and size but since most of
our work was in banks they all used one standard set. They were notorious
for throwing slugs off the belts. When they did, all the characters
following that one would be off by one until the belt came back the the
beginning of the character set and resynced itself. When it got to the
missing slug, it would lose sync again. Boy, I've replaced a zillion of the
character slugs. Since the Burroughs machines were ASCII and the printers
were EBCIC, all the ones that we used had a box hung on the side of the
printer that converted one code to the other.

>
> I used them for several years back in the late 70's BBS days,
>before I finally got to experience the luxury of an old decrepit
>Lear ADM-3... woo-hoo! no more meter-deep scrolls of paper all over
>the room at the end of the night! No more noise at three AM! No more
>ribbon running dry at the most critically inoportune moment....

  No more knocking the printer off line every time someone in the building
caused a static spark.

    Joe
Received on Fri May 28 1999 - 09:37:08 BST