M
Martin Gregorie
We were a small service bureau with a 1903S to keep busy. Among theRoedy said:I presume you were an "operator" at some point in your career and had
a faulty mylar tape loop that controlled the vertical tab stops on the
printer, causing the paper to slew endlessly at full rate. If it
happened when the covers were up you had an great arc in the air. If
closed, it packed the printer cover tight as a mummy case. To stop it
you stomped your foot on the input paper box to break the paper.
systems staff we did everything - analyzed, designed, coded and, when
necessary, operated too. I was never good enough to know what George 3
wanted by listening to the control teletype, but I could tell "LP 3 FIX"
when I was lining up paper from requests to, e.g. load a magnetic tape.
I knew operators who could drive the system entirely off sound for an
hour or so when the teletype's print head failed.
I don't remember our fast printer ever turning into a paper fountain -
or the paper tape loop breaking, but we did tend to use tougher material
than plain paper tape for production loops. I seem to remember that the
1900 printer would only throw about 3 feet of paper (i.e. about two
pages) before timing out and stopping. I know for sure that I never
broke the feed paper to stop the printer.
The 2900 printers were a nice improvement: they used a software
implementation of the paper loop and as well as telling the spooler what
sort of paper the job needed, you also told it what control loop to load.