[GreenKeys] Cleaners, lubricants, pipe-dream "The way things work" animation

[Tim McNerney]

Thanks to George for his advice on cleaners and lubricants, and others who
wrote to me privately to tell me that folks did indeed clean typing units by
running them through the dishwasher.

On the topic of figuring out how Model 28s and 35s work mechanically by
staring at them and studying the manuals...

...sure I wish I could get David Macaulay, author of "Underground",
"Cathedral", and "The New Way Things Work" to team up again with the PBS
animators who produced "Mill Times" to build us a working "virtual" model of
a teletype.  Once you had such a beast, you could, for example, "get inside"
the selector mechanism while it's running to see how the solenoid and cams
conspire to set of the code bars.  Yeah, just a pipe-dream, I guess...  Too
bad these machine were designed before the days of CAD, or this sort of
project would be a piece of cake...

My motivation, BTW, is to make computers more accessible to children by
using "digital machines" as examples.  For many students, digital
electronics are too abstract.  There's nothing geometric, no physical
cause-and-effect to "wrap your head around" inside a modern computer.  Now
old Teletypes, on the other hand...

Incidentally, it has been documented that kids who learn how to maintain
motor-scooters have an easier time learning about computers (see
"Technological Fluency and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by David
Cavallo: http://web.media.mit.edu/~cavallo/Thesis-index.pdf).

In the "can't hurt to ask department"...

  Where can the best drawings and "principles of operation" be found?

  Any Teletype design engineers on this list?

  Anyone interested in contributing to such a project?

--Tim

P.S. True, there is a lot of exposed machinery in any Teletype, and there
nothing stopping you from running the machine in super-slo-mo and watching,
for example, how the type-box move into position, assuming you can set a
specific state of the code bars "by hand"...