[GreenKeys] [External] Re: MITE AN/TCG-14A Video

[Jones, Douglas W]

From:  Joe Duszyński [joeduszynski1 at gmail.com] -- Saturday, May 7, 2022 9:06 PM

> So I'm curious is it like a Daisy wheel or a DMP or some sort of belted letters?

The MITE, like the Model 33, has a type cylinder that rotates and slides in order to pick the letter it prints.  Unlike the 33, the cylinder in the MITE is on a horizontal axis parallel to the line it is printing, and if I recall correctly, the hammer hits the paper from behind instead of typing against a rubber platten the way classic typewriters do.  The type cylinder has just 8 characters around it, and it is keyed to the shaft it rides on to select which letter faces the paper.  So that shaft rotates while the cylinder slides from side to side to select the letter in a row of 8 (for a 64 character alphabet).  The hammer is narrow and hits the paper from behind against the ribbon and cylinder to print the desired letter.

It's very clever, and like Teletypes, it's mostly mechanical decoding.  Not at all like a daisy wheel printer or the belted printers (GE Terminet, for example), technologies that only really became possible when you could pack a small computer worth of electronics into the printer.

            Doug Jones
            jones at cs.uiowa.edu