[GreenKeys] 3M "Wisperwriter"

[Steve Schlink]

While we are on the subject ...

Back in the early '80s, I worked for a company that sold the 3M 
"Wisperwriter" line of Telex/TWX terminals.

The units were mostly KSR (although there was an RO version) based on the 
Apple/Trendcom thermal printers.

We worked closely with WUTCo reps to replace the model 32s & 33s.

The thought was that if you could get the terminals out of the closet and 
into the office areas, it would generate more traffic.There were a lot of 
places where WUTCo was associated with the older (noisy) ttys.

The 3M unit was a nice, compact unit. But it's main shortcoming was that 
since it was thermal printing, you couldn't get multiple copies. And the 
small paper rolls.

One of our prospects used three part paper in their 33. My boss's solution 
was to tell them to just make 2 copies of the print-out. The obvious 
problem with that idea was that there was no pagination on the 33, so they 
would have had to cut the roll out put from the 33 and then ...

I had an interesting discussion with one of the techs about MTBF on 
mechanical vs. electronic terminal.

He made the very valid point that if he repaired a mech. unit, he could 
pretty much tell when anther would need replacement. But, with an 
electronic unit, if he replaced a part, he had no way to tell if or when 
the next part would fail. Not to mention that with an electronic unit, 
almost any failure is catastrophic.

In the end, the Wisperwriter got passed by, by Seimens and other units with 
CRTs.
3M did try to sell a CRT based unit, but by then (to mix metaphors) the 
horse was out of the barn, and they were still at the gate.

Steve



--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
The reason this message is shown is because the post was in HTML
or had an attachment.  Attachments are not allowed.  To learn how
to post in Plain-Text go to: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html  ---