19 Oct
2013
19 Oct
'13
5:57 p.m.
On 10/19/2013 02:20 PM, madodel wrote:
Brings back memories for sure. On the first mainframe
system I worked
with in the mid 80's we had to prevent anyone from entering lower case
letters into the IMS data bases because the chain printer only printed
upper case letters. If it encountered a lower case letter it left a
blank. God forbid someone forgot to do that when we created a new
screen for data entry. We had to change the screen edits to allow lower
case when we finally got a chain that could print both upper and lower
case. I remember how excited everyone was that we could now print in
mixed case.
That's strange--I thought that most high-speed chain printers had a
memory that corresponded to character positions on the type train. You
could (theoretically) map any character to any position on the train, so
you could automatically map lower-to-uppercase.
I do recall that some characters printed incredibly slowly because they
occurred only once on a type train. And there was no greater joy than
pulling little bits and pieces of the page-wide ribbon that had managed
to get itself tangled in the print train.
--Chuck