[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer

[James P. Kinney III]

Ol' fart ;)
On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 22:26 -0400, Mark Wright wrote:
> 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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> >>
> >
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> >
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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