[OT, WHIMSY] old experience with hardware, was Linux-compatible printer

John Martin martjh-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sun Dec 6 19:50:53 UTC 2009


Showing my age here: I had the care and feeding of an IBM 1403 for six
months in the early 70s as an operator at the Courtaulds Data Centre
(IBM 360/20 installation) in Nottingham, England. Very impressive
beast. A while later I moved to the Derby Data Centre. Seeing the same
model running under DOS/GRASP knocked my socks off. The phrases 'cpu
bound' and 'printer bound' come to mind.

And Terry, I had the same experience with those stupid control tapes.

Thanks everyone for the memories.


John Martin


On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 10:47 AM, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
>>
>> D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>>>
>>> Are you sure that it didn't use a print train (or print chain)?
>>> That's what IBM 1403 printers used.
>>
>> One of my brothers and I got a tour of the CN data centre in Moncton when
>> I was in high school by the father of one of our schoolmates. He ran a
>> program that played "Here Come the Saints" on the IBM chain printer. My
>> brother and I thought it was pretty amusing but you can't entertain kids
>> like that any more. :)
>
> Way back when I was a computer tech for CN Telecommunications/CNCP
> Telecommunications I serviced a couple of drum printers.  One wned by CN and
> the other on the Air Canada reservation system.  Both were located in the
> building at 151 Front St. W.  The chain printers I worked with didn't have
> anywhere near the capacity of those drum printers.
>
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