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

[Pete Lancashire]

> On Sun, 2009-12-06 at 01:11 -0500, 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.
>
> Do definitly a drum.  It was 8 or 10 inches in diameter.  The raised
> characters of the printable set were arranged around the circumference,
> and this was repeated 132 times at intervals of 1/10 inch along the
> length of the drum.

[warning showing age] Not sure about the diameter but Burroughs had
a drum printer that with a upper case drum could do either 900 or 1,100
lines per minute. It optionally had a power driven lid. The down side
was the print quality sucked and it did not like recycled green bar.
If you had a bunch of pages in a row that only had a few lines and were
spitting out pages 2-3 a second the power driven paper stacker got unhappy
and you had a mess on your hands real fast.

Their answer to the 1403 came out much later it was a train printer
that I can't remember if it had a power driven lid. The ones I used
didn't.

and so that not totally off topic, in Linux old days I built a
Linux based print server to drive five Dataproducts B600's (600
lines per minute) which printed invoices all day long. It was
a 80386 with I think 8 Megs of RAM, 1 GB disk, 10 Mbs Ethernet
and a SNA port. It replaced a a box that was costing the place I
did it for $1,500 a month.

-pete also an antique




>
> Another classic feature was the forms control tape.  I forget whether it
> was five- or seven-level.  The company had a jig which held the tape and
> guided the hand-held punch as you punched out the requisite holes.  Then
> you cut off a length of tape and glued it into a loop the length of the
> page.  The bit positions--or was it the bit patterns?--in a column of
> the tape are what documentation refers to when it talks about "skip to
> channel number".
>
> The funny thing is that after somebody showed me how to prepare one of
> the tapes, nobody else in the installation would admit to knowing how to
> do it.
>
> Cheers,
> Terry.
>
>
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