Ken Shirriff @righto.com · Oct 2 We fixed the vintage IBM printer at the Computer History Museum yesterday. Introduced in 1959, the IBM 1403 line printer provided fast, high-quality output, printing 132 character lines. Unfortunately, one column stopped printing, so we disassembled the printer to fix a bad hammer. Keep reading...
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Hey Ken, I worked with an engineer at Mostek in the very early 1980s. One day he showed up in my office with a kit of parts to build a reverse engineered Apple II clone. I was just out of school, the $300 price was a bit steep for me. I really wish I had bought one. Worked great for Visicalc.
The line printer uses a chain with raised characters that spins at high speed. It has 132 hammers, one for each column. When the right character on the chain is in front of a hammer, the hammer fires, printing that character. But if a hammer fails, that column doesn't print, as you can see. 2/N
As a kid, my father was head of MIS. He'd take me to the belly of the beast - cooling refrigeration (we lived in LatAm, so was nice), thumping elevated floors, spinning tapes with their jumping loops, and the clacking on the green and white paper (which I would take home to play with). IBM 🫶🏽 haha
Listen to this: www.npr.org/2007/08/09/7...