wrote:
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014 13:54:47 -0600, Califbill
wrote:

wrote:
On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 09:00:42 -0500, Hank wrote:

On 1/13/2014 10:50 PM, Califbill wrote:
Or you be like me that worked with card sorters and pneumatic card readers
with 110 db 3' from the heads, and you are missing certain frequency
ranges. Makes cheap players sound OK.

Nothing beats adjusting hammers on a high speed drum printer printing
lines of e's or dashes.
Maybe that's why my Creative speakers sound so good.
IBM's loudest printer in absolute dBs was the 3211 (2000+ line a
minute train printer) but the band printers may have had a more
irritating sound.
I was very happy to see the 3800 laser printer and the fact that the
DC companies embraced them.

NCR train printer was not as loud as the drum printer during hammer
adjustment. All hammers triggered almost simultaneously.

The 3211 train had separate type slugs for each character and they
were hit from behind into a fixed platten, similar to a typewriter.
Each slug would ring and the 4400 "bells" a second added up to a
heluva racket. That may actually have been the resonant frequency. It
was certainly oppressive. Fortunately you did the adjustment
electronically and there was a way to do it with the cover closed.
The 1100 LPM 1403 train printer was the one that sold for the highest
print quality and that was still the old school adjustment. (Usually
one guy adjusting, one guy watching.
I didn't really work in a shop that was anal about print quality but
we had some.
NIH guys used to have to check every printer every day and they had a
dozen of them. They used "T"s The top bar and the vertical bar had to
line up in both directions, sighting down the page.

NCR had a train printer also. But was more of a buss saw effect. We used
M to check hammers. Wanted line up and even color across the M.

wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:50:00 -0600, Califbill
wrote:


NCR had a train printer also. But was more of a buss saw effect. We used
M to check hammers. Wanted line up and even color across the M.

I never saw one. Was it a licensed IBM 1403/3203 or did you make them
yourself?

We made them. We sold one to a hardware wholesaler and they complained
about the slow printing performance. They sold lots of times in dozen
amounts, and there was only one Z in the train. Installed a few more, and
speed come up to the 3000+ lines per minute rate.

wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jan 2014 22:48:04 -0600, Califbill
wrote:

wrote:
On Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:50:00 -0600, Califbill
wrote:


NCR had a train printer also. But was more of a buss saw effect. We used
M to check hammers. Wanted line up and even color across the M.

I never saw one. Was it a licensed IBM 1403/3203 or did you make them
yourself?

We made them. We sold one to a hardware wholesaler and they complained
about the slow printing performance. They sold lots of times in dozen
amounts, and there was only one Z in the train. Installed a few more, and
speed come up to the 3000+ lines per minute rate.

I guess NCR just never had that much presence in DC, at least not in
the main frame business. They were the king of the ATM and POS
business tho.
Most of the competition I saw was for processors, memory and tape
drives. I never saw anyone going after our card, disk or printer
business.
I heard there were people rebadging the 1403 tho
I was real happy to see the laser printers and get away from all of
that.
They went a consistent 32 inches a second, no matter what you were
printing and no noise.

My first job after getting my degree, was at Itel. We were building a
channel interface to a Siemens ND2 laser printer to mimic an IBM laser
printer. I disassembled the channel diagnostics and figured out your
undocumented commands and what the response was supposed to be. Fun job.

wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jan 2014 10:15:05 -0600, Califbill
wrote:

wrote:

My first job after getting my degree, was at Itel. We were building a
channel interface to a Siemens ND2 laser printer to mimic an IBM laser
printer. I disassembled the channel diagnostics and figured out your
undocumented commands and what the response was supposed to be. Fun job.

I have been on the other side of that.
I got involved in a situation where we had 5 vendors trying to
diagnose a channel problem. The Itel AS5 guy and I were doing
microcode steps through out channel sequence (against orders) and we
were taking turns calling out the next address we wanted to stop on.
Their AS-5 microcode was lifted byte for byte from the 3158.

When we released the 4341, the microcode listing was a plant only
document. Eventually about 100 serialized copies were released to area
specialists. We had to sign a separate nondisclosure agreement for it
every year. I finally just turned mine back in because I never needed
it. We had better tools than stepping microcode.

Reverse engineered from the IBM code.
Funny story about the micro coder. His login was Floppy John. Because in
those days the Micro code was distributed on Floppy. When we left Itel
during the layoffs. They laid off 2300 of us when the AS4000 came out as
the residual lease values plumited. John went to another major company and
almost caused a shut down/ walkout by the union members as he plugged in
some equipment instead of calling the union guy to plug that wall plug in.