On 5/23/2014 8:53 PM, Tony B. Shepherd wrote:
> There was a lot of interest in publishing, using special print trains
> on the 1403 printers. There was a special carriage tape defined for
> the printer (that still can't be easily emulated today), and some
> folks punched card decks that could print pictures and other stuff.
> One problem was that you couldn't trust that the previous user ended
> their deck right - your job card deck could wind up as their data.
> Plain vanilla HASP could be tricked, so the "crunch card" was born.

Ahh yes... it was indeed a "special carriage tape"... that was mostly a
pain in the arse for those of us that operated the printers back in
those days.

Knoxville output evolved from the old original 11" x 14" greenbar,
132-column, 66-lines/page, 6 lines/inch big paper format -- they had
this "short" paper format that ran at similar specifications but was at
8 lines/inch.  I don't remember the exact dimensions (if it duplicated
66, or just "got close") but was basically around 8.5" x 14".  We had
custom-ordered stock paper for Knoxville output.

To make matters worse... the "carriage tape" that Tony mentions was a
"two-page" carriage tape, that had one channel reserved for "top of
fold" that only had one punch per two pages.  As printer paper was
fan-fold by nature, you had to be extremely careful with the carriage
tape and the paper and the printer to align things so that when the
paper was "folded"... the "upward facing" page corresponded to the
"top-of-fold" punch.  And part of the other HASP customizations included
code to insure that jobs always started on an "upward facing" page (it
was part of the job separator page logic).  So when you were printing a
whole series of jobs, and subsequently tore them apart for each separate
job, the "job separator / banner / identifier" page was always facing up :)

This worked great on the IBM printer with the physical carriage tape. 
However, our HP printers did not care for this in the least... they only
accepted one "page" of carriage tape and it was separated by a channel-1
punch.  The printer would balk if you attempted to feed it the 2-page
"Knoxville" tape.  Much hilarity ensued when we went to the HP2000, and
we ended up writing a program that sat and "read" the incoming printouts
and managed the output to the printer trying to keep track of the
"top-of-fold" position of the paper.

Ahh... nostalgia :)

Jeff

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