On 05/26/2016 08:54 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
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).
Yes, that's exactly the purpose they were for. You mounted
the text train and a film ribbon, and got a fairly nice
looking printout. IBM's early manuals were all printed this
way, the look was pretty iconic. The printed output was
then photographed to make offset printing plates. (Later
they used IBM composer word processing printers, and they
looked nicer, with proportional spacing.)
Jon
