[GreenKeys] Selectric I/O

[Larry DeSoto]

I remember those things.  When I still worked in ASW we had two of them on 
the maintenance console at NavFac Brawdy.  The first thing that happened 
when something went wrong was they would either break down or get well 
behind on reporting the errors.  We actually had three of those nightmares 
but two were usually making the local Welsh repairman rich.  I fought those 
things for a year and finally designed and built an interface card so we 
could use Telnet 1200s instead.  The Telnet 1200s had their own problems but 
at least they were fast about it.  The watch section got together and had a 
party when we trashed the Selectrics.

Larry - WA5MLH


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Edward Greeley" <etgreeley at earthlink.net>
To: "Keith Densmore" <densmore at kaponline.com>
Cc: "GreenKeys List" <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 8:12 PM
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Selectric I/O


> Hi Keith,
>
> Happy New Year and all that...
>
> Yep, I remember the Selectric-based terminals. I was a member of a
> computer club in Rome, NY in the early to mid '80s and ran afoul of
> those things. Seems that a club member had found a source of the things
> at a surplus/salvage place in Phila., PA and sicced a bunch of us onto
> them. I think there were a couple dozen or more of the machines living
> with club members. Problem was - they were EBCDIC coded jobs. Don't
> remember the brand. What to do with them?
>
> Well, at the time, I was the editor of the club newsletter and since I
> was constantly preaching to the members that I needed SOMETHING to put
> in the thing, someone said "somebody" ought to write up a conversion for
> the Selectrics. I was elected. I had found an article in a previous
> KB/Microcomputing or Byte mag that I used for the basis of "our"
> conversion. IIRC, the reference article had a source for the necessary
> electronics interface, but had nothing about how to un-EBCDIC the
> things. Had to buy (not cheap!) the IBM maint. and parts manuals for the
> basic Selectric then figure out how to change them back to "normal
> correspondence" configuration. Turned out that no major parts were
> required, but a rather major disassembly of the code bars for the
> selector mechanism that positions the ball for each character WAS
> required. What a PITA! We also had to acquire type balls to replace the
> EBCDIC ones. That was not cheap either. Sorta amazing how similar the
> Selectric selector mechanism was to TTY selectors.
>
> End result was that we wound up with a group of
> converted-deconverted-reconverted Selectrics that could be used as
> conventional off-line typewriters and as on-line ASCII computer
> terminals. I think a cheap dot matrix printer could be had for a bit
> less money, but a Diablo Hy-Type or A-J (also a Selectric conversion,
> IIRC) letter-quality machine was a LOT more money.
>
> Ironic that you should ask about this as it's just been in the last two
> or three months that I finally threw away my record copies of the club
> newsletters after all these years. My conversion article was in there.
> Never fails: Dump something, THEN you want it again. I may still have it
> on a CP/M - Wordstar floppy, but have nothing to read CP/M disks any 
> more...
>
> Ed Greeley
>
>
> Keith Densmore wrote:
>> Power to the Green in 2011,
>>
>> I came across an interesting old advertisement on Ebay for   a IBM 
>> Selectric
>> Terminal. This unit was put together by a company called Data-Trans and 
>> was
>> a 300 baud printing terminal.
>> The ad is here
>> 190361445421
>>
>> Any list members have, use,  or even know of the existence of any of 
>> these
>> old terminals? I know IBM had several versions of Selectric Teminals over
>> the years but most used non standard codes. But it might be possible to 
>> do a
>> data conversion with some modern electronics.  It would be cool to see 
>> one
>> running with HeavyMetal. Just trying to dream up more weird projects for 
>> the
>> new year.
>>
>> 73,
>> Keith ve3ts
>>
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