On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Joe wrote:
Speaking of interfacing Selectrics. I was talking
to my father
about Teletypes the other day and he told me that he had thrown out an
old "word processor" (my term not his). He said that it was a desk
sized mechanical unit that had a keyboard and mechanical printer along
with a paper tape punch/reader. He said that you could type in a
letter and insert a pause any place where you wanted to insert unique
data such as a name. The unit would save everything on punched paper
tape. You could then feed the PT back into and it would type the
letter. When it got to the pause it would stop and let you manually
type in the name or other data and then it would continue and finish
the letter. Does anyone know what these thing was? I think he must
It was a dead-tree spam generator.
have gotten this after I left home because I don't
remember ever
seeing it. Unfortunately he threw it away several years ago.
There were numerous such devices. For paper tape, the Friden flexowriter
comes to mind, but there were dozens of others.
Later, there was magnetic tape and magnetic cards (IBM MTST, MCST)