[GreenKeys] Teletype M12 KSR

[Jack]

Just think...if Teletype had succeeded with the Intronix, maybe all of the printers
we use today would say "Teletype" instead of "HP"!

The DX reader used wire sensing pins and they constantly got gunked up, out
of alignment, or even bent. They weren't made to read chadless tape from
Model 14's, I'm sure!

The 14 TD's on our TTY tables were the standard variety. There was a 7 foot
cabinet at every service order office that had a "SOTUS" sequence selector to
read the routing codes on the tapes...service orders were sent to
the local installation garage, central office frame and repair bureau as well
as to the local accounting office. Not every order went to every location, thus the
need for the sequence selector. I never saw one of those things break.

Jack


-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Haynes [mailto:jhhaynes at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2015 11:43 PM
To: Jack
Cc: 'Don Robert House K9TTY'; 'Duncan Brown'; 'Greenkeys'
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Teletype M12 KSR

On Thu, 22 Jan 2015, Jack wrote:

> that had come in as disconnects. The “Model 19’s” were a 15 KSR on a 
> wood table with
> 
> a TD and reperf. There were none of the mechanical keyboard punches. 
> By the mid-1970’s things

I picked up a machine in Kansas City (from a Telephone Pioneers group) that was similar to that - 15 KSR, but on a metal table, with a TD and a reperf, but no mechanical punch.  Was told it had been used by the telco for service orders.  The TD was similar to that used in the 81D1 systems, having a big Jones plug on it, and there were some boxes with polar relays set up to detect when certain characters were read from the tape.

> 
> in use into the late 70’s. DX readers (another nightmare) were used to 
> read
> 
> Model 14 tapes into the Comdat. I left the TTY gang in the late 70’s 
> and

The DX reader was under development when I was at Teletype, so I didn't see the end of it.  What turned out to be a nightmare?

> cellular engineering group. But, as far as I know, the Model 40’s 
> (4540) had already taken over as in-house machines.

A couple of ex-Teletype engineers went to San Diego and started a little company where they made a lot of money supporting Model 40 stuff for the telephone companies that were still using them.  The company still
exists:  datacap-inc.com
> 
> Interestingly, the Model 37 came and went almost overnight as far as 
> it being used internally at Ma Bell.
> 
And probably was used even less outside Ma Bell.  That was a fiasco.
Teletype's last totally-mechanical product.  Similar technology was used in the "900" stock ticker which I would call successful but had a rather short service life because of other means of getting the stock market reports out.  Model 37 was very late getting to market.  I was told that a major reason for the lateness was the engineers' insistence in making a mechanical selector that could run at 150 baud.  A seriously hard problem that should never have been undertaken since electronics could do the job so easily.  And the keyboard was the same as the Model 38 keyboard, based on the Model 32/33, terrible keyboard touch.  And it was competing against the IBM 2741 based on the Selectric typewriter with its superb keyboard touch.  And then was supplanted by the daisywheel printers, and finally by dot matrix printers that could produce typewriter quality print.

Then too, the M37 was somewhat related to the #1ESS-ADF which was a solution looking for a problem.  At one time there was a market for that kind of machine, but by the time it was getting usable the computer industry had moved on beyond dedicated communication processors.

In my opinion a lot of time and money was wasted trying to make the Inktronic printer practical.  It was a clever idea, but couldn't be turned into a practical machine.