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F*cking Printers

W. Kevin Vicklund
Posts: 2131
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 4:26 pm

Re: F*cking Printers

#51

Post by W. Kevin Vicklund »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 9:43 am This is a surprising thread. I thought the title said it all. :mrgreen:
ikr?!

You come here expecting porn, all you get is nostalgia.

Next you'll tell me the Alex Jones thread isn't all about how he needs to invest in some good lube.
qbawl
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Re: F*cking Printers

#52

Post by qbawl »

much ado wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 12:02 am The first printer I dealt with was the IBM 1403. I kind of miss the heavy metal days...

The 1403 was my first printer also. The C.E. gave me a card deck that could play She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain When she Comes and another one that printed out a risqué variation of the Mona Lisa.
W. Kevin Vicklund
Posts: 2131
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2021 4:26 pm

Re: F*cking Printers

#53

Post by W. Kevin Vicklund »

qbawl wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 2:50 pm
much ado wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 12:02 am The first printer I dealt with was the IBM 1403. I kind of miss the heavy metal days...

The 1403 was my first printer also. The C.E. gave me a card deck that could play She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain When she Comes and another one that printed out a risqué variation of the Mona Lisa.
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northland10
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Re: F*cking Printers

#54

Post by northland10 »

W. Kevin Vicklund wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 2:28 pm
Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 9:43 am This is a surprising thread. I thought the title said it all. :mrgreen:
You come here expecting porn, all you get is nostalgia.
It's time for me to start a thread called "buying replacement keyboards."
101010 :towel:
qbawl
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Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 11:05 am

Re: F*cking Printers

#55

Post by qbawl »

johnpcapitalist wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 8:49 am
qbawl wrote: Thu Apr 21, 2022 5:20 pm The first laser printer I used / worked with was an IBM 3800.
You have me beat by a year on the Old Geezer computing front. I was a Xerox 9700 guy; that printer was released in 1977, a year after the 3800. We had six 9700's when I worked in the IT department at Atari, 1981-1982, and we killed a semi trailer full of paper every weekend with the batch reporting we did.

IIRC, the IBM was not capable of doing graphics and fonts on the printed output, but the Xerox 9700 was. One of my tasks was to try and use the forms generation capability to make our invoices and reports look nicer... They had a nifty little programming language that would do that. Management was mightily impressed when a couple of the key reports started looking like something we would expect today. They especially liked the company logo on the upper right of each page. 40 years ago, it was quite an effort to get a digitized version of the logo.
As far as graphics on the 3800 was concerned it wasn't so much that it couldn't do graphics but more that it did them badly. The Mod 1 had a resolution of 180 × 144 pels. (pels being IBM speak for pixels or dots per inch.) The Mod 3 which I worked on was 240 x 240 dpi. IMHO anything less than 300 sucks for graphics. IBM referred to them as APA printers. APA being All Points Addressable. There was an attachment that allowed you to use a huge roll of paper as your input feed. We had 2 3800 Mod 3s, 4 Xerox 4050s, and a 4850.
qbawl
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Re: F*cking Printers

#56

Post by qbawl »

johnpcapitalist wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 8:54 am
much ado wrote: Fri Apr 22, 2022 12:02 am The first printer I dealt with was the IBM 1403. I kind of miss the heavy metal days...

I always loved watching the covers raise on the 1403 when it ran out of paper. And I remember hearing from the operators about what a disaster would be if a seal on the hydraulic paper advance system would fail, because it would dump (IIRC) 8 quarts of oil down into the plenum under the raised floor, and the facility would have to close while they cleaned it up.

Some of the first programs I ever wrote were Fortran programs written at USC in 1976 were to generate banners on the fanfold paper, one letter per 8 1/2 x 14 page. I still have a couple of those signs somewhere in the files.

If you watch the video, you'll see the printed output slowly growing from left to right across the page. There's a brief sentence fragment at the very end where it shows they're doing exactly what I thought: they're running a program that prints powers of two. Another one of the early Fortran programs I wrote in that USC class was to do exactly that -- using arrays to handle all those digits to calculate numbers larger than the 32-bit built-in data type.

(*nostalgic sigh*)

BTW, in case Foogy is reading this, I should point out that the USC class was for high school students. I became a proud Bruin/Cal Bear the year after and normally don't discuss this moment of secret academic shame.
The hydraulic cover model was a later iteration. The first 1403 I worked on in '67 was attached to a 1401 with enhanced storage of 8K total. It had no hydraulic cover it was totally manual and made an ungodly amount of noise cover up or cover down. Also it had a print chain as opposed to the later hydraulic cover model which used a print train. I don't think you could play music with the train but I could be wrong you still could print some neat pictures though.
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