[GreenKeys] Associated Press Teletype maintenance; UPI As Well

[COURYHOUSE at aol.com]

GREAT INFO  JIM!
 
yes  my extel is  the  weird  paper at SMECC..   anyone  got a ribbon 
conversion kit?
 
I did get a box of spare  parts for extel as it turned out  from  one of 
the list members here that had them for sale on ebay   maybe  ttyguy?     
there were some  black  belts  with the teeth and those  are not slimey like the 
  clear/yellow ones.  got all kinds of  weird  stuff and  crystals   for 
speed  changes  too!   (   no  ribbon kith though...  NEED RIBBON KIT! WANT TO 
PLAY!!
 
By the  way   CBS's Scott Pelley  got the Cronkite  award here in Phx  
today.  I  should have  some  video  of it all  to  show  later toniote...
 
 
In a message dated 11/21/2016 4:48:47 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,  
jhhaynes at earthlink.net writes:

On Mon,  21 Nov 2016, Charles Ring wrote:
> I also know that the name Extel means  "Ex-Teletype" since it was started 
by
> former Teletype Corp  workers,
> 
Except it doesn't.  I'm away from home, don't have  the document with me,
but this is discussed in a conversation we had with  Walt Zenner, the 
retired R&D VP of Teletype and co-founder of  Extel.  The gist of the
story is...Peter Mero persuaded Walt to start  a company with him after
Walt retired from Teletype.  Walt had done  some work for Mero previously
in connection with a Telautograph-like  machine which might have been
called Electro-Writer.  Peter Mero was  born in Hungary, worked for ITT
in Europe prior to WW-II, in WW-II was the  communications head for the
US OSS, and I don't know what he did after the  war until the association
with Walt Zenner.

Their initial concept  was a stock ticker that would print only selected
stocks, so that an  individual interested in a few stocks did not have to
read the whole daily  ticker tape to find the trades of interest.  This
was to be called  Quotemaster, which was also the name of the company; and
the customer was  Trans-Lux.  About that time Trans-Lux decided there 
wasn't much of a  market for the product and service, so it was never
manufactured.  But  Trans-Lux owned the design and the name.  So Peter and
Walt had to  start over with a new product and a new company name.

They decided the  product should be a dot matrix page printer.  That would
be much  simpler mechanically than a Teletype 15 or 28, thus should be 
easier for a  small company to manufacture and attractive to customers 
wanting a higher  speed printer that did not involve all the adjusting and
lubrication of a  Teletype.  For a company name - there is a company in
England named  Exchange Telegraph that provides the telegraph services for
the stock  exchanges.  It's commonly called Extel.  They found that name
was  not taken in the U.S., so they chose that as their company name.

So  they developed a prototype product and now had to sell it.  Peter  Mero,
whom I have heard likened to a used car salesman, took the prototype  to
Europe and showed it to Reuters.  He cabled back that they liked  it, and
would consider a large order, but first they wanted to visit the  Extel
factory.  At the time Extel had only a handful of employees, so  for the
Reuters visit they hired actors to make it look like they were a  much
larger company.  They got the order.

Some relationship  with Trans-Lux continued, because Trans-Lux developed
an electronic Telex  terminal that used the Extel printer mechanism.  This
was produced,  though I don't know about quantities.

One version of the Extel printer  uses a special paper developed by 3M 
which is impact sensitive and  requires no printer ribbon.  It's described
as have the surface coated  with micro-size eggs, each egg containing black
ink.  Hitting the  surface breaks the eggs and releases the ink.  No doubt
this was a lot  more costly than plain paper and ribbon, so there was also
a ribbon version  of the Extel printer.  Maybe George can tell us which
kinds he  encountered in the field.  So far as I know you can't get the
paper  any more, so an Extel printer without ribbon is  useless.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/greenkeys/attachments/20161121/5b38469f/attachment.html>