05-17-17 06:16 joe mackey wrote to NANCY BACKUS about Off topic
Howdy! Joe,

 jm> {at}MSGID: 
 jm> {at}REPLY: 
 jm>   Nancy wrote --

 JM>> When I was in college in the mid 70s we had a teletype machine that
 JM>> chattered away in a corner.

 NB> It's a sound you never forget... ;)

 jm>   Yep.

I remember the first Teletype Machines (RTTY) I heard ran at 60 WPM speed,
that was back in 1960, by 1962 the RTTY machines were running at 100 WPM
and the noise was a lot zippier.

Your college machine probably was running at 100 WPM or maybe at 300 WPM?

I never was around to hear what a 300 WPM RTTY sounded like.

When I wanted to use RTTY on my Ham Radio gear I didn't want a noisy
machine, so I assembled a Netronics ASCII/Video Kit and their Keyboard Kit
and used a TV Set to read what was sent & recieved and also used a
Tape Cassette Recorder to save the sessions.

The building where I worked at in the mid-1960's had a room full of
IBM computer gear and I could see the paper being printed jumping up at
about 2 lines per second and it amazed me how quick the print head must
be moving.

I talked to the operator and He let me see the Printer, it had a bar that
a chain of the type characters spun around and when the correct character
was in the right position a solinoid activated a hammer to hit it to
print it on the paper.
That bar had about 130 hammers spaced across it and when a line was printed
it sounded like a machine gun for a brief moment and the the paper would
jump up for the next line to get printed.

It was real noisy, but the printer was inside a room away from where the
Keypunch Operators sat so they didn't hear all that noise.


... If my computers didn't drive me crazy i'd be insane.
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