[GreenKeys] OT -- if a teletype engineer only had plastic parts

[Harold Hallikainen]

On Tue, July 29, 2025 9:22 am, Jim Haynes wrote:
> I was reading a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum where there was an article
> about a couple of star power train engineers at Ford who were laid off when
> the company saw there was no future in non-electric vehicles.  And I was
> thinking how Teletype Corp. had world-class ability to design and
> manufacture complicated mechanical items of metal and did not adequately
> forsee a future of plastics and stepper motors and electronics.

I think Teletype did a great job on the model 43, which had a plastic case
and used a stepper motor to move the print head and paper. It produced the
best impact dot matrix print I've ever seen.

Today, I'm very impressed with the "boil the ink" inkjet printers. Also,
I'm impressed with the speed of the thermal printers used to print
receipts at point of sale terminals. That paper just flies out of there,
and the print quality is very good (though sometimes it looks like the
print head needs to be cleaned).

Getting print on paper is fascinating!

Harold
https://w6iwi.org


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