On 2016-05-25 8:47 PM, jwsmobile wrote: The 1403 was replaced by the 3203 which used the same print trains there was also a faster 3211 that used a different train. Later there was the 4245 band printer which was a 3203 with a different front gate and later the 6262 which was the last of the big impact printers. The 3211 was announced in 1970 which may have been the end of the 1403, but people where still using them long after that. The 3203 was announced around 1979 and had performance comparable to 1403 and used the same trains, but did not have as good of a stacker. The 6262 had electronic hammer timing which took away one of the really tedious, not to mention deafening jobs in these printers. On the 3203 and 4245 each hammer had a set screw behind it that adjust the hammer flight timing and you would run a H pattern and look for columns that where off to one side adjust and run again and repeat until all 132 columns where looking good. On the 6262 there was a special setup tool that was put in front of the hammers and connected to the printer, and then you would run a test and it would electronically measure the timing of each hammer and adjust the firing time accordingly. I liked the big 3800 duplex setup, two 3800s where set up end to end with precise spacing between them the paper was fed through one one 3800 and into the other with the paper being turned over between them. The 3800 printer also had burst and slit features available that the CEs called rip and tear feature. Printing steadily a 3800 could empty a box of paper in four minutes and it would detect the end of the paper and stop before it fed all the way in and there was a fold down table with pins on it so the operator could align and join on the new box so they did not have to completely re-thread the paper. Paul

On 2016-05-25 8:48 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: The train printers where amazing technology but what often killed the trains was an operator who neglected to top off the oil reservoir, if the train went dry they would literally screech to a halt. It was always interesting when someone put a carriage control tape on backwards or didn't lower the brushes, the first skip would empty the box and the paper would be all packed up under the cover. Paul.

On 2016-05-25 9:46 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Yeah I watch some of the large system guys disassemble and repair trains and of course when you put them back together you had to make sure the slugs where all in the right order. We had customers that would buy 3rd party ribbons that where practically dripping with ink that would gum up everything in the machine. The other problem we had with 3rd party ribbons on 3203 and 4245 was some would be too transparent and would mess up the tracking sensor so the ribbons would go off one side. I only ever saw one of the drum style high speed printers and I think it was a Honeywell wavey line printer. I remember the operator demoed it for us by printing a picture, if you printed a whole line of the same character it would fire every hammer at the same time, it was very noisey. The 1403 limited the number of hammers that could fire simultaneously, for testing the CEs had what was called train breaker routine that would exercise the printer firing the maximum number repeatedly. Paul.

On 2016-05-25 10:43 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Speaking of dumps I remember an engineer friend telling me that at the university that he went to they had a CDC Cyber system and they discovered that you could initiate a dump from any workstation, and the system would dump out to the printer and while it was dumping the whole system came to a halt.... guess what the students where fond of doing...... It would seem to me that something like that should have been more restricted. In the first couple years of working as an electronic technician, we still had software people in the branch office, and I remember being blown away by this one guy. He came into the office with a MVS dump which was a 6-8 inch stack of paper and on the top of each was a header with the IAR and register contents when the system trapped. He looks at the IAR and digs into the dump to find that address and then he starts working backwards, unassembling the instructions in his head and after a few minutes he points to a spot in the dump and says "yes there it is, there is where it started to go wrong" Paul.

Apart from that, it's not credible for another reason. CDC Cyber operating systems always spooled printer output to disk (unlike OS/360 which did it in some variants but not others -- notably not OS/360 PCP which I used since our 360/44 wasn't big enough to do better). So a call to DMP would run only long enough do perform the formatting of whatever memory was being dumped, writing the resulting text to the disk file named "OUTPUT" for the invoking process ("control point"). paul

Speaking of ribbons, in college I occasionally used a type of ribbon I've never seen on line printers since: a film ribbon. Think of the "letter quality" ribbons used on professional typewriters, or daisy wheel printers, a thin plastic film with some carbon-like coating on one side. Now make one the width of a line printer ribbon. Our 360/44 normally used a regular cloth ribbon, but a film ribbon could be mounted if desired. I did so to print my honor's thesis, using the film ribbon and the upper/lower case print train (TN train?) to print the final text (from RUNOFF on our PDP-11 system, which had no line printer). paul

On 2016-05-26 1:43 PM, Jon Elson wrote: Not just manuals but also the ALD logic diagrams they where printed on a 1403 with a special print train. Paul.

On 2016-May-25, at 6:14 PM, Jon Elson wrote: A 1403 was in use at UBC for undergrad batch services up till the end of that service in 1979/80. I used to get a kick out of pushing the button to raise the cabinet shroud. The big shroud would rattle and shake as the motor-chain drive raised it to expose the print mechanism, all while it continued to print, and the noise level would go up by some tens of db. At least I presume it was a 1403, it looked like just like this: http://ibm-1401.info/1403Cable-PP-04-.jpg