Computers ... ARMY COMPUTERS! early & beastly with Friden What is it?

[Paul Koning]

> On Jun 24, 2015, at 4:25 AM, Nico de Jong <nico at farumdata.dk> wrote:
> 
> Hi ED
> I only know Friden as the makers of the Flexowriter. It was something like a 
> Teletype, but with many more characters. It was used heavily in the 
> typesetting industry

Many more?  The only Flexowriters I’ve run into are those used for Algol programming at TU Eindhoven.  They were better than many teletypes — upper and lower case, for one, and first class reliability.  But certainly nowhere enough characters for typesetting, not unless you used markup codes for things like italics (at which point an ASR33 would be almost as good).

Old style paper tape typesetting tended to use specialized machines.  Monotype uses oddball very wide tape, and Tape Operated Linotype uses, I think, 6 track paper tape but the perforating keyboard machines had specialized features in them to track the line width.

	paul