[GreenKeys] [External] Re: Terminet 8000 - magnetic printing

[Jones, Douglas W]

On 6/14/20 6:37 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> Well here I see a web page - line printer doing 30,000 lines per
> minute.
> http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/Radiation.Printer.dir/index.html

I had a friend, Frank Mayberry, who used to work at NASA's Johnson Space Center before we hired him at the University of Illinois.  He had a story about a high speed printer they installed.  Apparently, it was a dry process xerographic printer of some kind, and the paper came out of the printer at about one page per second with a very high electrostatic charge on it.  It was sheet fed, with the sheets intended to fall into an output hopper.

The trouble was, the electric charge.  The sheets repelled each other in the output bin, so instead of holding hundreds of pages, the bin held only tens of sheets.  At some point early in the life of the printer, the operator walked away while it was printing, and the bin began to overflow.  Charged pages would slide over other charged pages, but they tended to stick to non-conductive neutral surfaces, so a delta of pages began to form, spreading out over the floor, with new pages sliding over the surface pages with old pages until they stuck to the floor at the edge of the delta.  Apparently, but the time the operator returned, the delta had reached impressive dimensions.

My own experience with printers mostly involved impact print technologies, except for the Tetronix electrostatic printer, a gem of a wet-process machine that produced alcohol-soaked printout at a useful rate.  We had some of these in Department 1227 at Bell Labs, as well as one Teletype Inkatronic.  I don't know which printer I hated more, the Tetronix for its poor contrast and toxic aroma, or the Inkatronic, for its ability to leave spatters of sticky blue impossible to clean off ink on anyone who handled printout from it.

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu