form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

11 Oct 2008

replying to:

...
  From: Tom Watson <tsw-cc at johana.com>
 Subject: Re: form feed tapes on printers (was Re: Mona Lisa) 
...
 > Probably IBM--maybe 1620 SPS II printer mnemonics?

...
  Why right you are.  For those of you who aren't
reading at home,
 these mnemonics mean:
 SPIM: Space immediate (1-3 lines)
 SKIP: Skip immediate (to carriage control channel)
 SKAP: Skip after printing (carriage control)
 SPAP: Space after printing (1-3 lines) 
I can't top that,
my Autocoder mnemonics page is out of reach :-(

...
  All of these were control instructions that referenced
the printer
 (unit #9).  The carriage control tape was a standard 12 channel one
 (IBM used them on LOTS of printers like 407's and 1403's). 
And re-used the carriage mechanisms in later machines.
The tractor feed and carriage control tape from the 1132 printer
was recycled from earlier accounting machines.

...
  You could access any one of the 12 channels.
 The 1620 had two indicators for "summary line" (channel 9)
 and "end of printable page" (channel 12),
 which if you have a hard copy impact printer are probably still there. 
RPG has program flags triggered by that for subtotals, totals,
page footers, etc.
They were triggered virtually if the printer was not real-time.

I don't recall the model number, but the IBM RJE terminal
my high school had around 1976 didn't have a carriage control tape
but was programmed with perhaps 4 "jobs" that defined the page size,
carriage control stops, horizontal tabs, etc.
It was a nice sit-down console with keyboard, chain printer
and cabinet on the left with a 8" floppy drive.

...
  Yes, if you skipped to a channel that WASN'T
punched,
 you fed lots of paper, which is why (if you were smart)
 you punched the unused channels on the same line
 as the "end of paper" channel (12). 
I punched them all for top of page.
Sigh, I wish I had taken photos of my college's IBM 1130s
and all the little things like the bottle of genuine IBM mucilage
for gluing the carriage control tape into a loop.
I still have a pad of IBM forms for planning printouts,
with the carriage control tape along the edge
to indicate where to punch the holes.

...
  Oh, standard Fortran:
 blank, single space; 1, top of form; 0, double space;
 +, overprint (not supported everywhere). 
and - for triple space.
It took me a while to realize that there was nothing magic
about the first character as carriage control,
so instead of
 	format (" ","and more")
I evolved to
 	format (" and more")

...
  One of these days I'll dig out the computer pic I
made back
 in the late 60's using a video camera connected to an 1130.
 16 levels of gray, and 200x160 or so resolution.  Cool for the day! 
Wow!  How was that interfaced?  I'm trying to find ANYONE who
modded their 1130s, particularly with a
SAC (storage access channel) interface.

-- jeffj