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> Every card reader/lineprinter station had an operator to deal with the inevitable jams and other problems on my campus in the late 90s there was an old lab w
by chasd00 3y ago
> Every card reader/lineprinter station had an operator to deal with the inevitable jams and other problems
on my campus in the late 90s there was an old lab with unix stations in it ( can't remember what they were) that nobody went to. I always ended up in that lab because it was quiet and the workstations worked just fine for me. They had these extremely high speed printers in there that were very large and under glass. I was playing around and did something.. i can't remember what maybe sent a binary to the printers or something... they took off and went crazy and caused lots of headaches.
I had the nickname "dammitchad" in some of the labs because "dammit chad, quit screwing stuff up" was a pretty common phrase. I was one of the "other problems" you mention haha.
- chx 3y agoAbout those printers... Most people will tell you ISO 216 and DIN 476 are the same. this is not so The DIN 476 standard has very slightly tighter tolerances than the ISO 216 and in the mid 90s I had the good fortune to meet one of those fancy new printers, under glass, yes, which no longer used continuous form paper but rather it used ISO 216 A4 pages. Or that's what you thought. It used DIN 476. Hundreds and hundreds per minute. The input and output trays were the height of an adult person. And the moment someone bought A4 which was not DIN 476 compliant things went south. Very, very south. I believe the difference is half a millimetre (!). That printer was not mercifully designed.