Flexowriter history

Joe> Al pointed me to some information about the Flexowriter on Herb Joe> Johnson's website. It seems that the Flexowriters have been Joe> around since at least WW II and was orignally made by Commercial Joe> Controls. CC was bought out by Frieden sometime doing the Joe> 1960s. The original Flexowriter only had a PT reader and punch Joe> and no external I/O and was used for generating form Joe> letters. ... Flexowriters have also been used in place of keypunches by organizations that dislike punch cards. My first programming was in Holland, at the Tech U Eindhoven, home of the famous "THE" operating system. (If you've never heard of it, go read "the structure of the THE operating system" -- one of the best, and short, papers in the history of computing.) That was in the lage 1960s, a batch system, primarily using Algol (not Fortran), on a Philips EL-X8 27 bit machine. Program as well as application data entry was primarily by paper tape. So the "keypunch" room was actually a room full of Flexowriters. They had customized keyboards for the Algol character set, and handy features such as "stop tape duplicate on ';' character" so you could edit source tapes efficiently. After working with Flexowriters, exposure to the ASR33 came as a nasty shock -- those are shoddy clunkers compared to the rock solid workmanship of the Flexowriter. paul