[GreenKeys] Inktronic

[Robert Laag]

I HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF HAVING RECEIVED THREE INKTRONICS...  I WISH I COULD HAVE FOUND A HOME FOR THEM BEFORE THE FAMILY GOT UPSET WITH THEM AS THEY WERE LEAKING AND MAKING A BIG MESS...  IT WAS NOT A PRETTY SITUATION...  I DID HAVE SOME PRINT FROM ONE BUT WILL HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT...

--- On Wed, 6/1/11, DR HOUSE <k9tty at dls.net> wrote:

From: DR HOUSE <k9tty at dls.net>
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Inktronic
To: nagle at animats.com
Cc: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2011, 8:32 PM

Ge whiz John,

The paper is written in German..?
Don

We had an inktronic at United Air Lines in Elk Grove Village, IL.
You REALLY had to be trained to work on the machine or not touch it.
It was very nifty and could print text very fast.  So fast you could not
read the text until it stopped.  It was called a DataSpeed Printer
in the Bell System.  UAL liked it as the incoming weather and flight
data was practically instantaneous.  Eventually replaced with a
person at a CRT that would print when asked.

When I lived in California I was contacted by a daughter of a man
who had a working inktronic.  He died and the family was fighting over
the thing thinking it was extremely valuable.  I never did find out what
happened to the machine, or the several 101D Data Sets she told me
about.

Don


On 1 Jun 2011, at 11:40 AM, John Nagle wrote:

> From: Jim Haynes<jhhaynes at earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] model 40 update - no suprise on the type
>     carrier aka belt
>
> On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, Gerry Block wrote:
>
>> Jim I've never seen the inktronic but from what I've read over the  
>> years I
>> thought they were designed to spray paint everything but the paper.
>> ?
> I first saw the Inktronic principle demonstrated in 1959, printing  
> on a
> strip of paper tape.  If there had been a market for a high speed tape
> strip printer it might have been a real winner.  The problems got a  
> lot
> worse when it was made into a page printer, with 40 nozzles to print
> 80 columns.  As it came from the factory the print was readable across
> the page; but things went downhill from there.  I guess the main  
> problem
> was paper dust getting attracted to the electrodes, which were in the
> open air.  It was very hard to clean the electrodes without bending
> them, which caused distortion of the printing.    There was a problem
> getting ink droplets of uniform size to come out of the nozzles.
> All in all, a clever idea but not very practical.

     The Teletype Inktronic was an interesting concept.  The idea was
straightforward - generate a stream of ink droplets and deflect them
with electrostatic deflection plates, like an oscilloscope tube.
Doing this in air was tough, and too dependent on humidity.

     Also, at the time, ink droplet formation wasn't well understood.
It turns out that intuition fails you at that scale, where turbulence,
surface tension, and bonding forces dominate.  HP had to resort
to fluid dynamics simulations to figure out how to make a reliable
droplet emitter.

     For background on this, see

    http://doc.utwente.nl/58366/1/thesis_Wijshoff.pdf

     The Inktronic is mentioned on page 4.

                        John Nagle
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