[GreenKeys] Line Printer carriage control

[Jim Haynes]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2010, David Christ wrote:

> Speaking of IBM chain printers, we're back to punch tape again.
> Every form and every label stock had its own tab, form feed and top
> of form set up.  These were in the form of a loop of punched tape.  I

There was just recently some discussion in another group about these
carriage control tapes.  An occasional accident, or a student prank,
was to have the printer skip to a channel on the tape containing no
punches.  Apparently you could spew out a whole box of paper that way.
Those who prepared carriage control tapes had to learn to be sure that
each channel had at least one punch.  Some printer makers included a
timer to stop paper feeding after a short time regardless of the
carriage control tape.

I remember hearing a talk about a high speed printer built for Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory.  This used a row of a large number of styli writing
in parallel on fax paper, under control of a character generator that
turned the characters into dot-matrix representation.  There was an
external attachment that folded the paper as it came out of the printer.