ramq wrote:
Too much Yamazaki, Hamei?
I guess it's only funny if you had to run one ...
Maybe a little description ... the keys themselves don't work like a manual typewriter with that nice clean swing-out action. They are round and badly spaced as sm mentioned. They also slide in a housing with round sockets, but since it's all plastic they can't have a nice smooth sliding fit, no, they have to be loose or they'd seize. So the piston-sleeve interface gets all this dirt and crap in it and they slide very poorly and it takes a lot of pressure. Clank ! clank ! clank ! for every character. The baudrate wasn't a problem for manual entry, the stinking key action was. It's all mechanical but not even nice mechanical. Ponderous would be a good description, like hitting the keyboard with a rock.
Oh. Maybe you didn't know. There's no lower case. Also the "stop" comes from either illegible or non-existent punctuation. Maybe the early ones didn't even have it ? By the seventies they did but the "stop" convention was fail-safe. Every time I see someone write somewhere with caps lock on I think "This guy is posting from a Teletype ! Cool !"
As I mentioned, the method to correct was to back up the tape, overstrike the error with a null character, then (try to) return to where you were and carry on. Or mark the tape then you could manually correct later with a hand punch and splicer. There were kits for editing paper tape by hand with a guide rail, swing-down hand punch thingy and so on. One nice thing about mylar tape tho, no bitrot. A mylar tape will probably still be good in 100 years. Or maybe more ... almost as good as a stone tablet
Most teletypes did not have a serial interface. They had a current loop which didn't communicate with anything except a telephone. Timesharing, anyone ? I did that for about six months but it wasn't worth it (to me. I spent too much time on the process and the product and not enough on money money MONEY ! The time-shared faster cheaper not-better programs were not as good as hand-written ones.)
Nowadays it would be trivial to make a converter for rs-232 but then, there was no internet. The people who knew how to take three resistors and make a converter were not forthcoming with that information. Thus $200 of 1975 money for a 1" by 3" piece of fibreglass with three components on it. A new Sportster cost $1500 in 1972. A 1978 Ford Fiesta cost $3000. My tape punch cost more than the car.
Underneath the keys is a peculiar set of binary mechanical rods and levers which, naturally, don't move smoothly either. The Selectric of the same vintage is a joy to type on, even better than a Type M clicky keyboard. A Selectric would probably make a great input device for a computer. They really are great.
So you've got this clanky-ass pos to type on which
also
makes mistakes. The print head is a cylinder that moves to orient the character, then a hammer with a rubber pad whams it from behind onto the paper. Sometimes it whams it too hard, sometimes it whams it too soft, sometimes the letters don't get into the exact correct spot and after time the rubber pad gets all blown up and you don't have a new one handy so the thing whams on its own type-head with a hammer, which does bad things to the type head. The paper is also this cheap yellow junk that even a throwaway newspaper would be ashamed to use. No, there are not other suppliers for better paper. It was a weird size.
Meanwhile, the crappy punch mechanism screws up ab0ut once every three feet. Yes, feet. We're talking paper tape here. Specs on controls in those days described memory capacity in feet. 400 feet of extra memory in a Bendix 5 was something like $3,000. I think that was 32k but it might have been 16k, I forget the conversion factor
So what you do with an error is take the tape over to your handy-dandy editing kit and manually correct the mistake. Lots of guys in the seventies could read ASCII directly off a paper tape.
They also gave off this peculiar ozone-ey smell the whole time, too. There was about a half-horse motor in the back running constantly. (Okay, 1/2 hp is an exaggeration. But it may as well have been. It was a good 3 or 4 inches in diameter and looked like Thomas E himself designed it. )
When I finally got a Facit 4070 ( $4,000 new at the time) and an HP Vectra (they didn't have ES, RS, New Vectra, Old Vectra then it was just a $4,600 286 with a 13" color monitor) I was
soooo
happy. That really was good enough. We should have stopped Time right there.
You can tell how long people have been making parts by how they write programs ... FORTRAN is a nice comfortable language
N010 G90 M03 S450
N020 G92 X-13.3312 Z12.0312 M08 S1750
N030 G04 F2 T0303 (ROUGH TOOL CNMG 432)
N040 G00 X-5.5312 Z8.6312
N050 G01 Z4.75812 F.015
N060 G04 F2
N070 X-5.77 S425
N080 G00 Z8.5312 S475
N090 G01 X-5.3312 F.05
N100 Z7.5812 F.015
N110 G04 F2
N120 X5.5 S440
N130 G03 X-5.7812 Z7.3 I0 K.2812
N140 G01 Z2.5
N150 X-5.9
N160 G00 X-8.0 Z8.0
N170 G04 F2 T0505 (FINISH TOOL DNMG 432)
etc etc
Block numbers jump by ten so it's easy to insert edits. Imagine typing this clank clank clank one character at a time with an average program length of a couple hundred blocks. (Each program line is one block.) Milling programs are much larger. Can you imagine hunting down an 0 - o mistake on a five foot roll of trash yellow paper that looked like a ransom note ?
I still slash my sevens because a seven - one error is
really
hard to find in a hand-written program. But it can make a significant difference when you are moving several hundred pounds of steel at 400 inches per minute, hopefully not into a solid object.
Oh, but first you go to do the arithmetic. HP-41 to the rescue, one triangle at a time. Lucky for me that the only math I really liked was trigonometry ...
And you know what ? I would
leap
back to that time in a heartbeat. Yes, all this was clunky. But the world was a much better place (or the US was, at least.) Compare the real work people did then with the slashdot crap we have today. Ajax ! Soap ! Web 3 ! Gnome ! Compiz ! Social Networking ! Flash your boobies for some bitcoins ! Hooray ! Now wer'e progressive and advanced !
gag me with a spoon ... you don't have to be a cranky old fart to read the papers these days and wonder what's the point of humanity ? Wtf do people do that makes them worthwhile ? I saw some tiger paws on the sidewalk this morning and wanted to kill the useless shit selling them. I did give them a piece of my mind (not that there 's a lot to spare but still ... ) Luckily that's very very rare or there would be a foreigner in jail. The earth would be better off without us.
A Bendix 5 control has a Control Data computer as the thinking portion. K&T used PDP-8's and later built their own, Sundstrand used a PDP-11, McDonnel-Douglas built their own (Actrion), Giddings & Lewis built their own, Cincinnati built their own, GE built a pile of crap (GE has always been second-rate shit), Allen-Badley built their own, Hurco built their own, Westinghouse built a few different nice controls between periods of going into and out of the business, there were more I can't think of at the moment.
Every single one of them was better than that useless Fanuc
shit
(datum point in mid-air ? Are those people insane ?) but for political reasons (
Ve
vill control zee vorld ! Zee evil godless Commnists in Red China moost be controlled ! Und zee bankers are zee Important People een dis society ! Ja vohl !) the United States government let every one of them be destroyed by Kirk Kerkorian et al and the lousy rotten buck-toothed four-eyed murdering rapist Japs (e.g. Nanjing, vivisection on human subjects including American POWs, germ warfare, torture, etc etc - oh well, now we can do that because we are so
special
and really need to fight
tewwowism
so now it's okay.) And we actually gave the person responsible for those programs a free ride because the US wanted that data so we could use it in Korea. Nice. Hey Hillary ? Clean up your own overflowing toilet before you open that everflapping hole in your face, bitch. And that two-faced self-righteous cunt is going to run for president. I want to throw up.
"Let" them be destroyed ? We used to ask "How come the US doesn't have an industrial policy like Japan ?" Want to talk naive ? Boy were we stoopid. Of course the US had an industrial policy. The policy was "Crush the middle class and these saps who want to have a respectable living doing something worthwhile. Financiers are the Important People in society. They have MONEY ! We don't need no steenkin' middle class ! Look at Mexico ! Life there is so wonderful !" (for about ten people.)
Intellectual property, oh yeah. When it's Hollywood getting gored We MUST PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF THE CREATORS (e.g. Solomon Linda) but when it's some crappy rust-belt relic of the past industry like Bridgeport or Sundstrand that employed thousands of skilled craftsmen, ah fuck em, creative destruction is the strength of the kapitalist system ! Hooray, no more middle class to get in our way ! We will control the world ! This is the New American Century !
Fucking imbeciles at the top and fucking imbeciles parading along behind. All I can say is, the loser idiot middle class of the US went along with this crap for the past thirty years, so now there
is
no middle class. Just a bunch of whining self-righteous crybaby faggots snivelling when some of the evil they do worldwide comes back to haunt them.
The US is a stinking piece of rotting offal led by evil vicious scum. What a mess. Give me 1975 and I'll live with the Teletype.
I have like three of them, an original, one with corrected files, and a working one. Too confusing
