Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ntCobra
Sorry Bill, but I agree with Tony that the non-Hasselrig registrations look like they were printed from a mainframe computer printer that needs maintenance.
Back in the 1980s, I did some mainframe programming and printed on pre-printed forms. The mainframe printer technology of the 1980s (which predated laser printers with all kinds of fonts) was most likely the same as the 1960s. One of the places I worked at had some nice old ladies working with punched cards. So we had some old technology at the time for the 1980s.
I kept an antique tool of the trade, a forms ruler:
We would use a forms ruler to figure out character positioning on pre-printed forms.
In your Jim Morrison registration, those zeros and ones consistently dropping below the other characters looks like an out of adjustment mainframe printer. A typewriter would not misalign characters veritcally like that.
Mainframe printers did not have "serifs". If you look at the Hasselrig registration, it has "serifs" and ones & zeroes are lining up vertically, like you would expect a typewriter to do.
I say:
- Hasselrig registration is typewriter
- other registrations are mainframe computer printer |
The Morris card is obviously line printer stock. As is the other. That kind of card stock would be pre-printed forms. Typed forms would have been soft stock with multiple copies (either real carbon paper or later the self-duplicating).
Ha! I have two old forms rulers. One is plastic and the other metal.
The college I worked at upgraded the printer on our IBM 1130 from the 1132 which was a dog to a 1403 with our federal grant. The IBM channel adapter which also gave us high perofrmance disc drives, cost as much as the 1130 CPU box.
One student found a way to spew paper from the printer in the first few days we had it. In FORTRAN the WRITE (PRINT) statement always reserved the first character as a line control. "1" was "top of form", " " (space) was single line, I think "0" was double space, etc. Well, he left off the leading character and when he printed a big number (using "I4" as an integer format control - Integer, 4 characters) the numbers below 1000 caused it to see a space and single spaced. When he hit "1" it jumped to the top of the page. When he hit "2" the printer looked for a punch in the "2" channel on the page tape and just kept slewing paper until it ran out. There was paper flying 4 or 5 feet out the back of the printer across the room. Fortunately it wasn't that much paper in the box
. After that used a format tape that had a punch in each channel...
In FORTRAN the "+" carriage control was "no space", ie, overprint on the same line. Some people figured out that you could get gray scale by overprinting certain combinations. We had a card deck that would print a pretty decent rendition of the Mona Lisa on the 1403 (but with a new ribbon).
Printers of the day had 120 or 132 print positions and used fan-fold 11" paper with 66 lines (typically the format tape was set to use only 60 with channel 1 being the top of the page and another (12?) being the marker for page end of page with 60 lines used. The printer driver would send end-of-page and automatically skip to top. Some programming languages (like RPG and COBOL) had the ability to detect the end-of-page channel and would automatically skip to the top and print the "header lines".
Another fun fact of the 1403 was that the carriage was hydraulically driven. So once a year or so our IBM service rep would show up and don his his coveralls (normally he wore a gray suit with pencil thin tie, they all did) and literally change the
oil on the printer.
You know that during the Pandemic COBOL programmers were highly sought after. Many east-coast states unemployment systems were mainframe COBOL and were basically running in "benign neglect" mode. Old-time COBOL programmers were solicited from retirement to update them.