Fantastic. Just how we did it when I started uni in 1976. Except we had much wider paper and our line printers were a lot quicker. The delay was waiting for the operators to load your program along with a hundred others in a pile of cards and then deliver the print out to your pigeon hole. Usually better to go home and come back in the morning:)
Fortunately they soon rolled out a time sharing system where you could sit at your own teletype, KOS the Kent Online System. It was a bit like Unix.
Wonderful! As Heater said, our printers were a bit faster in the seventies.. and early eighties.. but I had forgotten how it felt to sit watching the printer write the output on line paper. Working directly at a console/printer with wide paper.. LA Decwriter, for example. Great feeling! Thanks for the link.
I remember that just after the year 2000, we sold our 'rather ancient' line printer at the office.
(One of those models with the characters on a band that rotated, with many of the characters repeated several places along the band, and one 'hammer' for each character posistion on a full 132char line)
There was a local newspaper that needed one for sending out subscription renewals.
We didn't tell them that we were happy to get rid of the monster.
(hadn't used it in 4 or 5 years, it was just so heavy that we hadn't tried to toss it out. As they both paid us and collected it themselves... )
Of course, we loaded them up with spare ribbons and even a 're-inker' and bottles of the ink and generally tried to be as helpful as we could.
(We never got that re-inker to work properly... But if they wanted our rubbish... )
The money went towards exercise equipment in the office basement.
I still have an Oki Microline printer at home.
Not much that's better for dumping long ASCII listings.
(Have about 1500 fan-fold sheets left of the current 2500 box. Should probably go buy one or two more as they're beginning to get difficult to find)
Ha! I have one of those Oki printers too!
I secured myself one that was about to get dumped, it had never been used, just stored until obsolete. At the last minute I remembered that I would need a proper matrix printer in order to print out my Snoopy calendar (1969) which I generated from a Fortran program running on an ancient mini (or rather, in the emulator I wrote for it). I have exactly one box of fan-fold sheet paper. Not sure if I will need any more.
Ahhh, the old chain printers. The IBM 1403(?) like 1400 132 column lines per minute. I think before the lasers took over on the mainframes we were up to 2000 or 2500 LPM. An amazing amount of noise when the covers were open and an amazing appetite for fanfold paper. The mechanics involved in moving everything that fast was very impressive. They were just fun to watch!!
...and at those speeds, if you messed up the alignment when loading forms, you could really trash a lot of custom forms in a hurry...payroll checks were really bad since they were many fewer lines than a normal page.
sylvie369
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Fortunately they soon rolled out a time sharing system where you could sit at your own teletype, KOS the Kent Online System. It was a bit like Unix.
-Tor
zeep zeep zeep
jack
(One of those models with the characters on a band that rotated, with many of the characters repeated several places along the band, and one 'hammer' for each character posistion on a full 132char line)
There was a local newspaper that needed one for sending out subscription renewals.
We didn't tell them that we were happy to get rid of the monster.
(hadn't used it in 4 or 5 years, it was just so heavy that we hadn't tried to toss it out. As they both paid us and collected it themselves... )
Of course, we loaded them up with spare ribbons and even a 're-inker' and bottles of the ink and generally tried to be as helpful as we could.
(We never got that re-inker to work properly... But if they wanted our rubbish... )
The money went towards exercise equipment in the office basement.
I still have an Oki Microline printer at home.
Not much that's better for dumping long ASCII listings.
(Have about 1500 fan-fold sheets left of the current 2500 box. Should probably go buy one or two more as they're beginning to get difficult to find)
I secured myself one that was about to get dumped, it had never been used, just stored until obsolete. At the last minute I remembered that I would need a proper matrix printer in order to print out my Snoopy calendar (1969) which I generated from a Fortran program running on an ancient mini (or rather, in the emulator I wrote for it). I have exactly one box of fan-fold sheet paper. Not sure if I will need any more.
If you screwed up the length, you got text on the perforation.
If you screwed up the width, you ended up cleaning the drum with isopopyl alcohol.
Either way, you learned you lesson and never did it again...