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

[Joe Duszyński]

Thanks! It wasn't really obvious in the video!


On Sat, May 7, 2022 at 10:54 PM Jones, Douglas W <douglas-w-jones at uiowa.edu>
wrote:

> 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
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