[TriLUG] Piece of History

Judy Hallman hallman at email.unc.edu
Sat Feb 23 09:03:19 EST 2008


One of my first projects with the UNC Computation Center was to write a 
spooling program for the printer. Program output was written to tape. 
The program, in assembler, spooled tape to printer. I think that was for 
the IBM 360/30, though the model 40 (August 1967) might have been in by 
then.

Judy Hallman
-----------
Len Boyle wrote:
> One of the first systems I worked on had three large band printers for green bar paper. The normal band had two sets of ascii characters but the computer operators could swap out the band for one with one set of ALA characters. My fuzzy memory says that the printer did 1200 132 character wide lines per minute.
> 
> len
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Tarus Balog
> Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 7:02 PM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Piece of History
> 
> 
> On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:25 PM, Judy Hallman wrote:
> 
>> My first experience with modems was with a teletype, connected to TUCC
>> (Triangle University's Computation Center).
> 
> Okay, I can't beat that, but I my first printer was a GE TermiNet that
> my Dad picked up for about $300 (he was a GE employee at the time).
> 
> The TRS-80 didn't have serial drivers (the $2000 9-pin dot matrix
> printers they sold were parallel only) so I had to write my own in
> assembly (hand coded with a lot of help from Kilobaud Microcomputing
> magazine). The TermiNet was a freaky printer - it had a bank of 118
> little hammers and the type consisted of little metal fingers on a
> rotating band. The character set was represented twice on the band and
> when the proper character came whizzing by the ribbon would pop up and
> the hammer would strike to print the character. It was really nice
> quality and a lot less than a daisywheel printer, although it did
> sound like a Sherman tank was coming down the road when I did print.
> 
> -T
> 
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