Bob Bridges wrote on 11/8/2023 6:56 AM:
Reminds me of an old tagline:
/* The more sophisticated the technology, the more vulnerable it is to
primitive attack. People often overlook the obvious. -Dr Who, 1978 */
Long ago I was told why my shop didn't carpet the tape storage area.
Apparently some shop that did had a problem with unreadable tapes.
Eventually they figured out that all the unreadable tapes were on the
bottom row of the tape storage. And the outside cleaning people used
a vacuum cleaner...
Farley, Peter wrote on 11/8/2023 7:58 AM:
1401N1 printer (the big beast) raised its hood automatically when it ran out of
paper, no way to turn off that behavior. NEVER put your coffee cup on top of
that printer!!
Supposedly the reason that IBM put that feature on the 1403 was some
big shops had a lot of 1403s and it helped the operator find the
printer that needed to be fed. Unfortunately, the feature didn't have
a failsafe. It was common to stack boxes of paper behind the
printer. At least once at UCLA, someone had stacked it one box too
high, and when the printer cover went up, the back end of the cover
was blocked by the too-high stack, raising the printer off the floor.
And BTW, the 3211 had a "raise cover" CCW. I had some fun with that,
and one of the other IBM-MAIN readers probably remembers that, from
Post 360.
On Wed, 8 Nov 2023 09:49:34 -0500, Rick Troth<tro...@gmail.com> wrote:
I've heard tales (probably at KTRU) of reading magnetic tape/cards
with iron filings and a loupe.
In high school, I watched a guy splice 1" reel-to-reel video tape and avoid the
picture rolling by finding the sync marks with the above method and carefully
cutting the tape right on the sync marks.
BTW, I still have around 12 or so boxes of 2000 blank 80 column
cards. That's about 500 years of shopping lists...
/Leonard
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