Weekly Classic Computer Trivia Question (20141215)

[Richard Loken]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2014, Doug Ingraham wrote:

> One of my friends reminded me of the most unusual uses of the 1000 LPM
> printer on the CDC 3400 that South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
> had in the 1970's and that was as a bass drum when the computer played the
> Stars and Stripes forever.  I only saw this run a handful of times and it
> is probably one of those things lost forever.  Even if someone had a copy

Back about 35 years ago, a friend told me that he was once a student at
Red Deer College in Alberta, Canada where he programmed his batch jobs so
that the printer made a distictive noise when his output was printed.
Apparantly the printer could be heard pretty much any place where he was
likely to be.

In unrelated news, I maintained two Data Printer Corporation "Chain Train"
line printers at that time and once had a problem where the left and right
edges of the output became wavey.  After a moderate amount of scrutiny, the
problem was traced to a marginal capacitor in the main power supply (it is
still on my desk and it is a...  hmm...  General Electric 3042181 86F570MA
40,000 uF 50VDC unit). There were two identical capacitors and it took a
long time to dig that far into the machine so I replaced both of them.

-- 
   Richard Loken VE6BSV, Unix System Administrator : "Anybody can be a father
   Athabasca University                            :  but you have to earn
   Athabasca, Alberta Canada                       :  the title of 'daddy'"
   ** richardlo at admin.athabascau.ca **             :  - Lynn Johnston