Don said:
 
>Boy, this does bring back memories.  We had a 2000/Access at the JC I
>went to in Cupertino, CA.  It had 2883(?) disc drives (3) and a GE
>printing terminal for the console.  The console used a character band
>like one of the old line printers (ka-chunk-chunk-chunk...).
<snip>
 
Weren't the 2883 drives 47 Mb and about the size of a washing machine?  I
think we called them "ISS" drives, but I'm not sure what the ISS stood for.
The GE printing terminal sounds like the GE Terminet 300 or 1200 (300 baud
or 1200 baud internal modem).
 
I loved the GE Terminets I used, but they were always breaking off the "type
fingers".  Type fingers were sort of like the type face you see on an old
typewriter welded onto the end of a thin piece of springy steel that was
about half as thick as a tin can lid, about 1/8 inch wide, and about 2
inches long.   The type fingers were stuck into a rubber coated steel belt.
A bank of hammers (one hammer for each of the 132 print positions) fired at
(usually) the appropriate time to hit the correct type finger.
 
The hammers didn't fire in column order.  They fired when the proper type
finger came around, hence the chunk-chunk-chunk sound.  Usually that was OK,
but sometimes it meant that two or more hammers needed to fire at once, and
apparently the power supply couldn't do that on a routine basis, as you
could often hear two or three hammers fire at once and then the "twang" of
the next hammer failing to fire with sufficient force, striking the type
finger late, hitting the trailing edge of the type finger, sliding into the
space between fingers, and in the process of retracting, ripping the next
type finger out of the belt.  We "lost" type fingers frequently enough that
the service man always left a kit with replacement type fingers on site so
we could replace them ourselves.
 
Eventually we switched to dot matrix printers, but for some applications we
continued to use the GE Terminets because of their print quality.  The GE
Terminets survived until the daisy wheel printers (with their lower
maintenance cost) forced the retirement of the Terminets.
 
John
--------------------------------------------------------------
John Korb                            email: [log in to unmask]
Innovative Software Solutions, Inc.
 
The thoughts, comments, and opinions expressed herein are mine
and do not reflect those of my employer(s), or anyone else.