[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer

[Mark Wright]

I have worked on 6262's.  Didn't know anything about them but usually 
got them running.

The most bodacious  (thats the only word that comes to mind) printer I 
have ever worked on was an STK 5000.  It was not a dot matrix but a 
band printer.  It was the biggest and baddest impact printer in the 
land.  It could print 5000 132 character lines in one minute.  It was 
huge.  Imagine a continuos tractor fed sheet  of paper two feet wide 
flying through this huge machine as it is pounded by a row of hammers 
132 characters wide.  The noise of five or six servo controlled motors 
big enough to power a golf cart going full blast was incredible alone, 
then the hammers printing...

There used to be four of these in the windowless State archive building 
downtown that printed all the tag and title forms for the state.  They 
were still in use last time I was there about 1999.

I took a Fortran class using punch cards, a card reader to input 
program and data and output from a line printer.  We didn't even have 
console with a tube an keyboard.  The card reader and printer we 
connected using IBM SNA (systems network architecture) and a T1 to GA 
Tech's mainframe.

I the late 80's I installed a computer for AT&T that cost 4 million 
without any disk or tape subsystems.  They bought the disk, tape and 
network stuff from other companies.  This computer and the connected 
devices would just sit idle in the case another computer on the other 
side of the data center had a failure.  These computers routed 800 
calls.  AT&T lost about 100 million in business because that first 
computer went down once.  (anyone remember a 800 number and cell phone 
issue in the late 80's in New York?) Hence the approximately 6 million 
dollar hot spare.

I love stuff like this.  I have more stories.  I better shut up.  Once 
a Space Shuttle launch was put off because we asked for time to apply 
patches to a System at AT&T.    Ok Ok, I'm stopping

Oh wait!  The console processor on the Mainframes I worked on used 
UNIX!  (Is that close to having a Linux topic?)

Mark


On May 26, 2005, at 2:36 PM, Matt Magee wrote:

> Not old enough to have worked with a 1403, but one place I worked at 
> had a pair of 6262s which apparently operate in a similar manner.  The 
> 6262s will induce hearing loss if you leave the doors open!
>
> People would ask why we used these huge twinax connected monsters.  
> The reply was always "because it works!"
>
> Ben Coleman wrote:
>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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>> Brian J. Dowd wrote:
>> | My first home computer (1975) ran a Teletype ASR33...
>> | Now that was a kick. Stood on an attached stand and was shipped to
>> | me bolted to a wooden palette. Sounded just like a newsroom at 110
>> baud :-)
>> | Is anyone else ancient on this list or are the other geezers still
>> | running DOS or Windows?
>>
>> I'm ancient enough to remember the IBM 1403 line printers from the 
>> same
>> era.  Talk about loud!  I remember one where if you had several lines 
>> of
>> asterisks (typical for the header and trailer pages), it sounded as
>> though someone was hitting it with a hammer.  Fast, though!
>>
>> Ben
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