On 12/20/24 18:36, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
The IBM 1403 printer had interchangeable print chains. I know of only
four 1403 printers still working — two at the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, CA, one at the IBM Technology Center in Böblingen,
Germany, and one near Endicott, NY.
<snip>
Van Snyder
I don't know what chain we used at University of Mo, Rolla. We had a
360/50 with 512K of memory and a 1mb LCS so could run a lot of stuff.
they had Fortran H as well as the other compiler languages, would assume
they had that chain. I don't recall any changes of chains other than
perhaps failures.
The fun story I have was from when I was playing one night and had
accidentally done a skip to channel, 12, which on our printer had no
stops, so it would jet paper out as fast as it could go.
The first run of it jammed a big mess in the back output feed. The
operator guy, Dennis Ditch asked me after he had cleaned up the mess if
there were any other runs queued, and I thought there weren't. He had
the back up, (mentioned in other posts could mess up your time if you
had something sitting on the case.
Anyway people may recall that there was a set of controls on the back by
the takeup, and he was sitting there when he asked me about the other
runs. The system was MVT and was running jobs w/o anyone attending the
console of course.
He went ahead and put it back online. The thing that impressed me was
that the paper flew over his head and didn't touch the floor for 20'.
Oops, guess it was still queue. He hit the offline very quickly, but
probably 30 or 40 pages were ejected, luckily not jamming the printer again.
He left if offline and went over and killed that job, and checked that
there weren't any others.
thanks
Jim
