I remember the army-portable version of that printer. I worked in a communications lab and we had one around to check the equipment we were developing. It was notable because it could meet military EMI radiation requirements and it could do 60 uA current loop while standard Teletypes were 60 mA. The low loop current was intended to help reduce EMI emissions. At the time, the US military standard was 45.45 Baud Baudot 5 level code 60 WPM. The printer could handle up to 1200 BPS, and I don’t remember if it was switchable to ASCII.
@@darrenhersey9794 The Earth bound Army version had the Supposedly RF proof cabinet snd there was wire mesh in the the glass for viewing the print mechanism - I believe to help prevent RF escape. At the time RF intercept was being taken pretty seriously. That was late 1970s - early 1980s snd RF suppression science wasn’t as good as it is now. The fix then was to shield everything like crazy rather than to design boards for low emission to start with. Consumer products went through the same sort of evolution. I remember when the Apple II came out in 1979, it could wipe out a table radio’s reception on the other side of the room. The FCC came out with class A industrial and class B residential interference rules. Apple’s initial response was to shoot the inside of the case with conductive paint and use metal shielding around the cut-outs for the card slots. By the time the Apple IIe came out, they were better at designing the board and it was back to being in a plain structural foam case. I’m. not sure why there was a magnitude specification on the current loop. TTYs operated as current driven devices, rather than voltage driven. That helped make operation independent of loop length. The Army spec was 60 uA for the current loop. They even retrofitted the huge model 29 Teletypes for low current operation. I don’t recall ever seeing any rise time specifications which seems strange because the pulse edge is what is going to generate a lot of rich RF. At 45.45 Baud, they could have afforded to pretty heavily low pass filter the signal to round off the pulse edge. The US government had a spec book available to people with clearance, and that specified maximum equipment emission levels which they believed were below what the Soviets and other sneaky people could intercept. With the attention to RF leakage, I guessed they had either been burned by intercept or they were doing it to the Soviets and knew they should prevent their own RF leaks. The other side of the coin is susceptibility. You need your equipment to be resistant to EMP from natural or man made sources and to be able to resist flooding attacks by microwave beams snd the like. Space based equipment gets bombarded with cosmic radiation. The first microprocessor to be space rated was the RCA Cosmac Elf 1802 because its CMOS design made it more resistant to radiation.
About a decade ago I almost bought a very technologically backwards Datametrics army thermal printer from the mid-1980s. The reason I didn't buy it is because I couldn't find a way to power it. To tell you how backwards the design was, it had a board full of TO-5 transistors just to drive the elements of the Gulton line printhead inside- and this was a 1980s design! The modernised version of the same printer uses an off-the-shelf Citizen driver IC and printhead.
I get what you're saying. And, yes, that kind of discrete design was sorely outdated for the year. But imagine what it's like from a reliability standpoint - or as the repair tech. When you have a failed or damaged IC, you have to ditch the whole thing, and you can't probe in-between the inputs and outputs to see what it's doing. The more functions crammed into one IC, the more you lose when it goes off. 60s/70s stuff has high part counts, isn't space efficient, and has a lot of parallel / replicated topology, but it's all pretty independent, and a lot easier to trace and mend. Low part count IC systems, when they go wrong, REALLY go wrong. The thing I hate the most is custom ICs (and usually my ire goes to HP for this - especially ones that contain high-ish voltage driver outputs). But the worst thing I can recall was a customer who brought me a 1980s Futaba precision DRO and glass scales. Under the hood, the readout was essentially one very large (~48 pin) custom PDIP. No datasheet for the part, no drawings for the unit, no source of replacements. Most of the unit outside that was just interconnects and a bit of buffering. There really wasn't much I could do unless I wanted to reverse-engineer all the functions of the IC and try to cobble together a functional replacement using a general purpose device with programming. Ancient Anilam / Acu-Rite / whatever stuff, with high part counts, has a much greater chance of repair.
Sounds a sexy bit of kit the military go overboard with robustness but forget the more mass you have the more "g" you have to manage. Racal did the same. Still it is comforting to have such stuff in the study. Check out " John Huchinson " , his lab is full of wonderful RADAR and RT kit. I like the 2N3055 I find it is better containing the blue smoke. Best
It must be April Fools day...... As someone who has spent many hours running these things to hear the shuttle had one on board is mind boggling. How much fuel was needed to launch that. Nice to see such an interesting object.
@@JosiahGould Thanks I missed that, I still can't understand what is so hazardous about a thermal paper printer or fax. A Thermal printer is not noisy so they would have to box it in for sound proofing even so why could they not put a circulation fan to keep things from thermal overload and treat the paper with bromine to retard fire. They mentioned Apollo 1 in the report but that was an oxygen rich environment, another dumb decision. Noise becomes a problem so the box the printer in only for it to have cooling issues. But that is NASA and they spend too much time doing workarounds instead of evolving. Thanks for the correction. Thanks I missed that, I still can't understand what is so hazardous about a thermal paper printer or fax. They mentioned Apollo 1 in the report but that was an oxygen rich environment, another dumb decision. Noise becomes a problem so the box the printer in only for it to have cooling issues. A Thermal printer is not noisy so they would have saved all that trouble even so why could they not put a circulation fan to keep things from thermal overload and treat the paper to retard fire. But that is NASA and they spend too much time doing workarounds instead of evolving. Thanks for the correction.
@WOFFY-qc9te Thermal paper has a chemical coating to make it heat sensitive. It's anybody's guess what bromine would do to that. Also, having to use special paper that's not readily available is not quite the off-the-shelf solution they wanted.
@WOFFY-qc9te Thermal paper is very sensitive to chemical exposure and obviously heat. Just a smear of oil will turn it black. Imagine trying to handle thermal paper with greasy hands from performing repairs. Not a thing i'd like to be bothered with in a high stress situation.
Hey! That's a Fairbanks scale! They are made where I went to high school, Saint Johnsbury - Vermont, and the 2 brothers, Thaddeus and Erasmus, actually founded my school. Oddly, this is the first time I ever saw one outside of my home town!
Oh.. a drum printer. That brings back memories from the 1980's. We had a surplus General Electric / Honeywell / Bull 132 column drum printer. About 600kg worth of printer and huge cabinet sized control unit. As we wanted to hook it up to our home designed Motorola MC6809 system we had to study the service and training docs. Which, to make things entertaining, were a mix of English and French (Bull being a French company of course). Decoding terminology like "horloge d'interligne" and "tambour de frappe" was entertaining. And the fact that I still remember tells me something about my weird memory I suppose 😂
One of my foster brothers was on a few shuttle missions! The technology was dated when they made it to orbit, but it was extremely reliable! It reminds me of the Russian Globus. If it works, don't change it!
I have a book he gave me talking about the, at that point, *future* space shuttle. If I can find that book, I will happily let you all scan it in for inclusion in a future doodley-doo!
The military used teleprinters well in to the 1990s. Fax machines had been the standard for a while in the corporate world for some time at this point. The reason why the military used teleprinters was simple. They could be used with very poor radio signals. A fax machine was normally run at 9600 baud. 1 kilobyte per second. A teleprinter ran perfectly well at 1200 baud. Given that signals to and from the space shuttle would often be bounced around several relay stations, the lower baud rate was much preferred. Reliability of communications was far more important than speed.
In its defense, it has seen a few years, lol. These little tidbits from the space program are always fascinating. Looking forward to see you all getting it back up and running again.
While there seems to be a bit of ambiguity, it cost the Space Shuttle somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000 per pound of payload into LEO. That would put this at just shy of $1.5 million per launch to get this into orbit as Master Ken stated. The shuttle was set off 135 missions. While I am sure by the time the final launches were lofted, this wasn't a part of it, but if it had, the total cost just to launch this device over the course of the program would have been $199,125,000. With inflation from 1981 to 2024, that number is $491,998,050. A half billion dollars to print characters on paper in space! Enjoyed the heck out of this video as always Marc :)
I met Eileen Collins at SpaceFest in 2021. I had a photo of her on Atlantis STS-84 where she was surrounded by a long loop of the tearoff edging and I asked her what was going on. I had no idea about the teletype either. She said NASA would send up the daily activity schedule on it. And the sound of the teletype would wake up the crew before Houston sent up their official wakep call. So, there must be another variant of this teletype that NASA used. And raises the question of why tractor fed versus the one you have?
By the 21st Century the Shuttle had a color printer that fit in a padded zipper bag. I saw it in one of the pictures of debris from Columbia. Crazy that the printer *fell from space* and landed with apparently no damage. Whomever found it had partially unzipped the bag so the printer and some cords could be seen, and on the outside of the bag was a label that said COLOR PRINTER.
Interesting! I'm reading that Discovery first used a Epson Stylus Color 800 in 1998. Looked pretty rugged with a metal exo-skeleton of sorts, and paper trays. Looks like they used the same model on the ISS.
It's successor was a digital Fax like system with continuous tones, so it wasn't compatible to standard Group 3 or 4 faxes. The first iteration didn't work reliably, but then the second one, based on a commercial (though expensive) greyscale printer worked. I'm wondering if they just could have used a standard dot-matrix printer? With a 24 pin print-head even some stuck pins wouldn't have been much of a problem.
The new translated title on TH-cam are awful because there is no way of accessing the original. There is no way of disabling them, there is no way of convincing TH-cam that I am in fact bilingual ! En tant que Français publiant des vidéos en anglais, je suis certain que vous comprennez le problème.
@@benjaminhanke79 I'm talking about the titles and descriptions. For years, TH-cam have been randomly auto-translating them (often badly) with no way of disabling it, and I think that with the new audio track settings they enabled it by default on every channel. (Many channel disabled it, luckily.) There is a Chrome extension that is supposed to help with that. I just want a way to tell what the original language of a video was before watching it.
@@Luzgar Your right i misread your comment. And I want that feature "just give me the original language" too. But wasn't it for the longest time only the title they translated? Now it's also the description text. Very annoying.
@@benjaminhanke79 It's infuriating, there have been complaints going all the way back to 2019, but instead of addressing them they doubled down and made it even worse. TH-cam does not believe that a single person can speak more than one language, despite the fact that you can add secondary languages on your Google account. Just let me see the original, I'm begging you !
02:20 I had spotted the scale with the ballpoint surface before but never realised what it is. I would love to see an elevator music explanation on it.
That was actually satisfyingly nerdy, interesting they had one of those on board the shuttle. I wonder if it had problems? Those FSK tones interested my cat 😂
I would have actually expected the temperature derating to be at least in part due to lack of convection in zero G. Perhaps the drum airflow is enough to cool things a little :D
This team is turning into the prime restorers of antique space hardware. If NASA ever decides to revive an old satellite and they need some specialised ground support equipment, Marc will probably just say "Yes, i have a working one in my basement"
24kg!!! Damn! Surely they could have lightened it! Regardless, this is within my ability to comprehend. :D Wonderful work!! Can't wait for the next installment,
Oh my gosh! A teletype on yhe soace shuttle 😂 i just love how the basis of all modern comouters is the 'standard out' print command and linux is based in unix which is based on running a timeshare computer OS with a teletype. My grandpa was a telegraph and teletype engineer. I still have some of the special tools for replacing and servicing relays and other components for switch boards and teletypes.
It looks as if the form factor was the driving factor. Interesting, because the DEC LA-36 printer would have been a better choice if weight were considered. Interesting that they used the MC6800 processor. We used the MC6802 (a close relative) in the Data General D200 terminal in 1981 (development began in 1978). Of course they would use non-standard FSK and get only 600 baud. Bell 202 half-duplex modems used 1200/2400 Hz and would have worked fine at 1200 baud.
08:39 I know engineering can just be that way sometimes, but I'm getting serious "swallowed the spider to catch the fly" energy from this part of the story of how this thing was developed.
Maybe next time you can turn down the awful noise once we know it's part of the system... Lucky there's captions because I had to turn the audio off, I just could not stand those beeps any more. 😆
Because then you need a computer that can decode the signal and have something that can take all the vibrations from launch. The teletype already has that.
Why this heavy printer ! in 1980 Epson had the MX80 9 pin dot-matrix printer , very light and printed on plain paper . Seems crazy taking this boat anchor into space , surly they could adapt MX80 to accept FSK , likely a FSK to parallel or RS232 already existed . Must be loads of issues using this teletype in zero G likely the overheating wasn't helped as no natural convection . Great video though keep up the good work There were some fairly light/small daisy wheel printers available in 1980 if they wanted a character printer
OK guys, here's your vital communication link. Oh, for the first few flights, you can only use it for 10 minutes every orbit, and it's installed in a non-ventilated cupboard, right next to the sleeping bags. That's vintage cowboy NASA.
When I was small, my father talked about hearing "high speed Morse" on the shortwave bands. Much later, I realised he must have been hearing RTTY signals but didn't know what they were called.
Quand j’étais jeune, on avait du matériel « portable » (qu’une personne peut porter, comme un ordinateur ou un oscilloscope portable), du « portatif » qui pouvait être transporté, comme l’imprimante militaire montrée , à plusieurs ou sur de courtes distances. Le « portatif » se caractérisait du « fixe » par la présence de poignées de transport, couvercles et autres protections intégrées. Et un poids qui ne nécessitait pas un palan ou un chariot élévateur 😊
An Epson MX-80 (commercially available in 1980) would have saved at least 18kgs. if they only got 600 baud, then the MX-80's 80cps would be quite adequate. And more important; Green bar printout -- in space. All that extra room could have been used for a decent little modem. (Let alone that a thermal printer plus an automatic fire-extinguishing system would still be lighter than than the TTY. ... and I'm not mentioning that the shuttle operates in a vacuum... just put the printer in the airlock. Problem solved.)
The MX-80 was a real workhorse. It was slow as molasses, but ran forever. It did have a serial board option from Epson too. This shuttle teleprinter would have been quite a bit faster than the MX-80. We had the Army version with keyboard in the lab where I worked. I wonder how cartridge ribbon of the MX-80 would do in zero G? The Army model uses standard Underwood style ribbon spools snd it probably would have been easy to cobble up a ribbon with some kind of space certified low VOC ink. The Army printer also uses roll paper which takes up less storage space than pin feed paper. Another candidate would be an Okidata Microline (forget the model). It was the standard reservation printer in just about every hotel up to about year 2000. It used the same Underwood style ribbon spools and was faster than the MX-80. I believe it is about age contemporary. The Okidata could do pin feed; I don’t know if it could do roll paper.
@@wtmayhew Obsługiwała z odpowiednim podajnikiem, ale nie było to niezawodne jak ten teletype, Czasem za 4 razem udało się załadować dobrze papier. Reszta ok
@ Thank you for the reply. I never had to load the paper. It is not surprising to learn that it took four times to get the paper to load correctly. The design was not very user friendly.
@ I probably should have put a /s on my remark. That’s typical government forest snd trees. Spend 1.5 million to launch a TTY, but bean count other stuff to Earth’s end.
I have to take issue with those estimates of cost we always hear like how this cost 1.5mil to launch every time. Calculating the cost by dividing the total launch cost by total payload weight makes absolutely no sense since the launch was going to happen anyway whether this was on board or not, and whether it weighed 1lb or 500. As long as there was excess payload capacity available and the launch was already happening, the actual cost to launch an extra 52lbs would actually just be the cost of however much extra propellant required to get that extra 52 lbs to the same orbit. Using the rocket equation and the shuttle data, I calculate each additional lb required around 10-15lbs of excess propellant, so on the high end and using 90's prices, we're talking around $300-400 extra to launch that thing. Not bad at all IMO
Those FSK tones made my cat go nuts
We went nuts too…
Same!
I grimmaced a bit myself...🤭
Mine too!
Ken never fails to impress me with his knowledge.
Master Ken 😃
I'm convinced he is a wizard.
@@srOmatic The Ken of Masters
It certainly looks like a prototype device - the label stating 'Class III Not For Flight' on the inside is probably an important clue :-)
Or a test unit… the corrosion/dirt looks like they subjected it to some harsh environmental conditions
I remember the army-portable version of that printer. I worked in a communications lab and we had one around to check the equipment we were developing. It was notable because it could meet military EMI radiation requirements and it could do 60 uA current loop while standard Teletypes were 60 mA. The low loop current was intended to help reduce EMI emissions. At the time, the US military standard was 45.45 Baud Baudot 5 level code 60 WPM. The printer could handle up to 1200 BPS, and I don’t remember if it was switchable to ASCII.
This comment is close to what my guess was going to be for this video. The reason it is heavy is because the pesky Russians might be listening.
@@darrenhersey9794 The Earth bound Army version had the Supposedly RF proof cabinet snd there was wire mesh in the the glass for viewing the print mechanism - I believe to help prevent RF escape. At the time RF intercept was being taken pretty seriously. That was late 1970s - early 1980s snd RF suppression science wasn’t as good as it is now. The fix then was to shield everything like crazy rather than to design boards for low emission to start with.
Consumer products went through the same sort of evolution. I remember when the Apple II came out in 1979, it could wipe out a table radio’s reception on the other side of the room. The FCC came out with class A industrial and class B residential interference rules. Apple’s initial response was to shoot the inside of the case with conductive paint and use metal shielding around the cut-outs for the card slots. By the time the Apple IIe came out, they were better at designing the board and it was back to being in a plain structural foam case.
I’m. not sure why there was a magnitude specification on the current loop. TTYs operated as current driven devices, rather than voltage driven. That helped make operation independent of loop length. The Army spec was 60 uA for the current loop. They even retrofitted the huge model 29 Teletypes for low current operation. I don’t recall ever seeing any rise time specifications which seems strange because the pulse edge is what is going to generate a lot of rich RF. At 45.45 Baud, they could have afforded to pretty heavily low pass filter the signal to round off the pulse edge. The US government had a spec book available to people with clearance, and that specified maximum equipment emission levels which they believed were below what the Soviets and other sneaky people could intercept. With the attention to RF leakage, I guessed they had either been burned by intercept or they were doing it to the Soviets and knew they should prevent their own RF leaks.
The other side of the coin is susceptibility. You need your equipment to be resistant to EMP from natural or man made sources and to be able to resist flooding attacks by microwave beams snd the like. Space based equipment gets bombarded with cosmic radiation. The first microprocessor to be space rated was the RCA Cosmac Elf 1802 because its CMOS design made it more resistant to radiation.
@2:08 You know, the Navy sure does like their boat anchors.
🥁
About a decade ago I almost bought a very technologically backwards Datametrics army thermal printer from the mid-1980s. The reason I didn't buy it is because I couldn't find a way to power it. To tell you how backwards the design was, it had a board full of TO-5 transistors just to drive the elements of the Gulton line printhead inside- and this was a 1980s design! The modernised version of the same printer uses an off-the-shelf Citizen driver IC and printhead.
I get what you're saying. And, yes, that kind of discrete design was sorely outdated for the year. But imagine what it's like from a reliability standpoint - or as the repair tech. When you have a failed or damaged IC, you have to ditch the whole thing, and you can't probe in-between the inputs and outputs to see what it's doing. The more functions crammed into one IC, the more you lose when it goes off. 60s/70s stuff has high part counts, isn't space efficient, and has a lot of parallel / replicated topology, but it's all pretty independent, and a lot easier to trace and mend. Low part count IC systems, when they go wrong, REALLY go wrong.
The thing I hate the most is custom ICs (and usually my ire goes to HP for this - especially ones that contain high-ish voltage driver outputs). But the worst thing I can recall was a customer who brought me a 1980s Futaba precision DRO and glass scales. Under the hood, the readout was essentially one very large (~48 pin) custom PDIP. No datasheet for the part, no drawings for the unit, no source of replacements. Most of the unit outside that was just interconnects and a bit of buffering. There really wasn't much I could do unless I wanted to reverse-engineer all the functions of the IC and try to cobble together a functional replacement using a general purpose device with programming. Ancient Anilam / Acu-Rite / whatever stuff, with high part counts, has a much greater chance of repair.
Sounds a sexy bit of kit the military go overboard with robustness but forget the more mass you have the more "g" you have to manage. Racal did the same. Still it is comforting to have such stuff in the study.
Check out " John Huchinson " , his lab is full of wonderful RADAR and RT kit.
I like the 2N3055 I find it is better containing the blue smoke. Best
Probably was designed for radiation.
It must be April Fools day...... As someone who has spent many hours running these things to hear the shuttle had one on board is mind boggling. How much fuel was needed to launch that. Nice to see such an interesting object.
I think Ken said it cost about $1.5 million in weight cost each launch.
@@JosiahGould Thanks I missed that, I still can't understand what is so hazardous about a thermal paper printer or fax. A Thermal printer is not noisy so they would have to box it in for sound proofing even so why could they not put a circulation fan to keep things from thermal overload and treat the paper with bromine to retard fire.
They mentioned Apollo 1 in the report but that was an oxygen rich environment, another dumb decision. Noise becomes a problem so the box the printer in only for it to have cooling issues.
But that is NASA and they spend too much time doing workarounds instead of evolving. Thanks for the correction. Thanks I missed that, I still can't understand what is so hazardous about a thermal paper printer or fax. They mentioned Apollo 1 in the report but that was an oxygen rich environment, another dumb decision. Noise becomes a problem so the box the printer in only for it to have cooling issues. A Thermal printer is not noisy so they would have saved all that trouble even so why could they not put a circulation fan to keep things from thermal overload and treat the paper to retard fire. But that is NASA and they spend too much time doing workarounds instead of evolving. Thanks for the correction.
@WOFFY-qc9te Thermal paper has a chemical coating to make it heat sensitive. It's anybody's guess what bromine would do to that. Also, having to use special paper that's not readily available is not quite the off-the-shelf solution they wanted.
Well the Shuttle was a space _ship_. Weight isn't that important on ships, isn't it?
@WOFFY-qc9te Thermal paper is very sensitive to chemical exposure and obviously heat. Just a smear of oil will turn it black. Imagine trying to handle thermal paper with greasy hands from performing repairs. Not a thing i'd like to be bothered with in a high stress situation.
Thanks!
Well thank YOU!
Hey! That's a Fairbanks scale! They are made where I went to high school, Saint Johnsbury - Vermont, and the 2 brothers, Thaddeus and Erasmus, actually founded my school. Oddly, this is the first time I ever saw one outside of my home town!
Oh.. a drum printer. That brings back memories from the 1980's. We had a surplus General Electric / Honeywell / Bull 132 column drum printer. About 600kg worth of printer and huge cabinet sized control unit. As we wanted to hook it up to our home designed Motorola MC6809 system we had to study the service and training docs. Which, to make things entertaining, were a mix of English and French (Bull being a French company of course). Decoding terminology like "horloge d'interligne" and "tambour de frappe" was entertaining. And the fact that I still remember tells me something about my weird memory I suppose 😂
you guys are my heros
*heroes
I'd like to suggest a notch filter to cut out the FSK tones while testing. They're kinda painful when turned up enough to hear you clearly.
I absolutely +1 this,
Thirded!
Chain drive for the drum speaks tons about design priorities for this thing.
You have cats that understand 600 baud NASA RTTY ? Amazing (I bet they can't do FT-8 though ) !
One of my foster brothers was on a few shuttle missions! The technology was dated when they made it to orbit, but it was extremely reliable! It reminds me of the Russian Globus. If it works, don't change it!
I have a book he gave me talking about the, at that point, *future* space shuttle. If I can find that book, I will happily let you all scan it in for inclusion in a future doodley-doo!
@@dustinsmous5413which mission was he on?
Gotta love him for doing that metric conversion for the non-imperial users.
Well, that is not too surprising. The metric system is of French origin after all.
@@pa1wbu that is true, i actually forgot that he was French lol.
Imperial units are standardized from metric units.
@@drewhailstones4106 He's actually Swiss.
@@planetcrypto8662 that is also true.
A sound from the past... That sped up FSK sounds like the tape "turbo mode" for the 8bit ZX Spectrum!
The military used teleprinters well in to the 1990s. Fax machines had been the standard for a while in the corporate world for some time at this point. The reason why the military used teleprinters was simple. They could be used with very poor radio signals. A fax machine was normally run at 9600 baud. 1 kilobyte per second. A teleprinter ran perfectly well at 1200 baud. Given that signals to and from the space shuttle would often be bounced around several relay stations, the lower baud rate was much preferred. Reliability of communications was far more important than speed.
In its defense, it has seen a few years, lol. These little tidbits from the space program are always fascinating. Looking forward to see you all getting it back up and running again.
While there seems to be a bit of ambiguity, it cost the Space Shuttle somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000 per pound of payload into LEO. That would put this at just shy of $1.5 million per launch to get this into orbit as Master Ken stated. The shuttle was set off 135 missions. While I am sure by the time the final launches were lofted, this wasn't a part of it, but if it had, the total cost just to launch this device over the course of the program would have been $199,125,000. With inflation from 1981 to 2024, that number is $491,998,050. A half billion dollars to print characters on paper in space!
Enjoyed the heck out of this video as always Marc :)
I met Eileen Collins at SpaceFest in 2021. I had a photo of her on Atlantis STS-84 where she was surrounded by a long loop of the tearoff edging and I asked her what was going on. I had no idea about the teletype either. She said NASA would send up the daily activity schedule on it. And the sound of the teletype would wake up the crew before Houston sent up their official wakep call. So, there must be another variant of this teletype that NASA used. And raises the question of why tractor fed versus the one you have?
12:49 and the sticker at 3:25 that says “Class III Not For Flight” seems to confirm that this was a ground test prototype.
By the 21st Century the Shuttle had a color printer that fit in a padded zipper bag. I saw it in one of the pictures of debris from Columbia. Crazy that the printer *fell from space* and landed with apparently no damage. Whomever found it had partially unzipped the bag so the printer and some cords could be seen, and on the outside of the bag was a label that said COLOR PRINTER.
Interesting!
I'm reading that Discovery first used a Epson Stylus Color 800 in 1998. Looked pretty rugged with a metal exo-skeleton of sorts, and paper trays.
Looks like they used the same model on the ISS.
People forget, the engineers etc were not idiots. It did the job it needed to do.
Especially when communications needed to be bulletproof, and you've only got one of them on board (I'm guessing).
It's successor was a digital Fax like system with continuous tones, so it wasn't compatible to standard Group 3 or 4 faxes. The first iteration didn't work reliably, but then the second one, based on a commercial (though expensive) greyscale printer worked.
I'm wondering if they just could have used a standard dot-matrix printer? With a 24 pin print-head even some stuck pins wouldn't have been much of a problem.
Love your videos on space tech!
New series! So excite
The cross-over I didn't know I needed. Teletype and the shuttle.
The new translated title on TH-cam are awful because there is no way of accessing the original.
There is no way of disabling them, there is no way of convincing TH-cam that I am in fact bilingual !
En tant que Français publiant des vidéos en anglais, je suis certain que vous comprennez le problème.
You can select the audio track by clicking on the "settings" symbol ⚙️ at least if you use the app.
@@benjaminhanke79 I'm talking about the titles and descriptions.
For years, TH-cam have been randomly auto-translating them (often badly) with no way of disabling it, and I think that with the new audio track settings they enabled it by default on every channel.
(Many channel disabled it, luckily.)
There is a Chrome extension that is supposed to help with that.
I just want a way to tell what the original language of a video was before watching it.
@@Luzgar Your right i misread your comment. And I want that feature "just give me the original language" too. But wasn't it for the longest time only the title they translated? Now it's also the description text. Very annoying.
@@benjaminhanke79 It's infuriating, there have been complaints going all the way back to 2019, but instead of addressing them they doubled down and made it even worse.
TH-cam does not believe that a single person can speak more than one language, despite the fact that you can add secondary languages on your Google account.
Just let me see the original, I'm begging you !
Keep it coming, just brilliant, thanks team
I also couldn't imagine it being very quiet!
Oh I was hoping this one may show up for restoration
The weight probably was not an issue as they still had to get the CG of the shuttle correct.
Hi Curious Mark, I have a friend who has an entire folder about this stuff that you might find useful. How can I connect you guys?
That would be great! Follow the contact link in the video description.
@@CuriousMarc Done! And sorry, I meant to say "Marc".
I love the reading room of the Library of Congress. I spent a lot of time there in the 1990's
Based on the per kilo cost of Space Shuttle launch that ~30kg teletype cost ~$425,580 each time it was launched. Wow.
02:20 I had spotted the scale with the ballpoint surface before but never realised what it is. I would love to see an elevator music explanation on it.
That was actually satisfyingly nerdy, interesting they had one of those on board the shuttle. I wonder if it had problems? Those FSK tones interested my cat 😂
That's one heavy-ass space shuttle anchor for sure! Lovely piece of tech.
"Rrrrring! Rrrrring! Rrrrring! Whirrrrrrrrrrrr! Until next time..."
this was on the Nav station on the P3 Orion
Another great video 👍🏻
@6:43. Mr Chekov hard at work! 🙂
I would have actually expected the temperature derating to be at least in part due to lack of convection in zero G. Perhaps the drum airflow is enough to cool things a little :D
Eighty hammers and this monstrous drum full of characters - who gets those crazy ideas? 😀
Can't wait to see it in action!
That whistle was painful! I hope you can exclude it for the next one ;-) Great video even though I switched to CC at t the end.
Turn down your treble, that should fix it
@@paulstubbs7678 Sure. Let's make my audio muddy on all other videos except this one. I'll get right on that.
I saw that mini lathe hiding in that corner
This team is turning into the prime restorers of antique space hardware. If NASA ever decides to revive an old satellite and they need some specialised ground support equipment, Marc will probably just say "Yes, i have a working one in my basement"
It seems wrong to say, but I'm looking forward to the mechanical disasters, can't wait for the next video!
Nothing wrong with that, we prefer when the equipment is broken too. That's when we learn something.
24kg!!! Damn! Surely they could have lightened it! Regardless, this is within my ability to comprehend. :D Wonderful work!! Can't wait for the next installment,
They did! No case, half a frame no keyboard most of the ac parts.
24kg is the "lightweight" version lol
I remember these. Our lab had one. The case and keyboard weigh almost as much as the mechanical chassis.
Y'all got a source of an exactly 6.4 kHz tone somewhere in your lab. (Noticed it around the 10:20 mark.)
can't wait for the next. vous êtes de fabuleux barjos 😍😍😲😲
I'm 13 seconds in... I bet Ken will never even begin to figure this thing out 😊
Oh my gosh! A teletype on yhe soace shuttle 😂 i just love how the basis of all modern comouters is the 'standard out' print command and linux is based in unix which is based on running a timeshare computer OS with a teletype. My grandpa was a telegraph and teletype engineer. I still have some of the special tools for replacing and servicing relays and other components for switch boards and teletypes.
but can it play Marc Oilfield's famous "Tabular Bells" from the critically acclaimed album "Current Loops: Make Break Space"?
Marc, why didn’t they use a Model 43 TTY ?
Lighter,9 pin dot matrix print head, regular paper
big fan bro
It's like a mechanical cicada.
That sound was horrible haha. Thank goodness you enabled captions. 😅
There a literal chain in damn thing. Space age technology for sure.
Me: "I heard it costs a fortune, for every extra gram sent into Space?"
Shuttle: "Hold my Teleprinter..."
It looks as if the form factor was the driving factor. Interesting, because the DEC LA-36 printer would have been a better choice if weight were considered. Interesting that they used the MC6800 processor. We used the MC6802 (a close relative) in the Data General D200 terminal in 1981 (development began in 1978). Of course they would use non-standard FSK and get only 600 baud. Bell 202 half-duplex modems used 1200/2400 Hz and would have worked fine at 1200 baud.
It’s high-tech so obviously ready for space shuttle!
The only thing that surprises me is that NASA didn't have the military design replicated with beryllium parts to save weight.
Is that secret message "HELLORLD" by any chance?
08:39 I know engineering can just be that way sometimes, but I'm getting serious "swallowed the spider to catch the fly" energy from this part of the story of how this thing was developed.
Maybe next time you can turn down the awful noise once we know it's part of the system... Lucky there's captions because I had to turn the audio off, I just could not stand those beeps any more. 😆
The quoted cost to send this to space is pure nuts
What is the name of the intro music ??
that little red marshall amp is cute as a button :)
Was this type of unit fitted in all Shuttles or just one?
@2:05 - I, too am from the Navy and I am also extremely heavy. Wait, what?
Did they need some ballast in the space station and lead was out of stock ?
Why not a daisy-wheel printer?
Because then you need a computer that can decode the signal and have something that can take all the vibrations from launch. The teletype already has that.
We know NASA loves an acronym - so what did they call the Shuttle Interim Teletype ?
Why this heavy printer ! in 1980 Epson had the MX80 9 pin dot-matrix printer , very light and printed on plain paper . Seems crazy taking this boat anchor into space , surly they could adapt MX80 to accept FSK , likely a FSK to parallel or RS232 already existed . Must be loads of issues using this teletype in zero G likely the overheating wasn't helped as no natural convection . Great video though keep up the good work
There were some fairly light/small daisy wheel printers available in 1980 if they wanted a character printer
8:42 maybe because there is no convectieve cooling without gravity?
OK guys, here's your vital communication link. Oh, for the first few flights, you can only use it for 10 minutes every orbit, and it's installed in a non-ventilated cupboard, right next to the sleeping bags. That's vintage cowboy NASA.
06:09 Maybe that explains why it's called the *Sh*uttle *I*nterim *T*eleprinter…?
When I was small, my father talked about hearing "high speed Morse" on the shortwave bands. Much later, I realised he must have been hearing RTTY signals but didn't know what they were called.
Plain high speed morse also existed. Telegrams were prepared on punch tape, and sent at higher speeds like 120wpm to save time.
I used to fix those suckers. 60 lbs though? Sheesh....they could have lightened that up a lot.
Wow!!! Next you need a fax machine
Surely dot matrix printers were available at that time? They must have been quicker and lighter?
3:45 - not for flight?!
Interesting that they didn't mention the issues with dot-matrix printers that led them to go with the Teletype instead.
This is obviously the faster-than-light Space Teletype described by Ursula Le Guin, known as Ansible. Difficult to test at this time and age.
I wonder what the firmware looks like
Quand j’étais jeune, on avait du matériel « portable » (qu’une personne peut porter, comme un ordinateur ou un oscilloscope portable), du « portatif » qui pouvait être transporté, comme l’imprimante militaire montrée , à plusieurs ou sur de courtes distances.
Le « portatif » se caractérisait du « fixe » par la présence de poignées de transport, couvercles et autres protections intégrées. Et un poids qui ne nécessitait pas un palan ou un chariot élévateur 😊
I still say the Model 40 would have been a better choice. :) But if they got that boat anchor to run on orbit... can't argue with that.
An Epson MX-80 (commercially available in 1980) would have saved at least 18kgs. if they only got 600 baud, then the MX-80's 80cps would be quite adequate. And more important; Green bar printout -- in space. All that extra room could have been used for a decent little modem. (Let alone that a thermal printer plus an automatic fire-extinguishing system would still be lighter than than the TTY. ... and I'm not mentioning that the shuttle operates in a vacuum... just put the printer in the airlock. Problem solved.)
Would probably be harder to cerrtify though
The MX-80 was a real workhorse. It was slow as molasses, but ran forever. It did have a serial board option from Epson too. This shuttle teleprinter would have been quite a bit faster than the MX-80. We had the Army version with keyboard in the lab where I worked. I wonder how cartridge ribbon of the MX-80 would do in zero G? The Army model uses standard Underwood style ribbon spools snd it probably would have been easy to cobble up a ribbon with some kind of space certified low VOC ink. The Army printer also uses roll paper which takes up less storage space than pin feed paper.
Another candidate would be an Okidata Microline (forget the model). It was the standard reservation printer in just about every hotel up to about year 2000. It used the same Underwood style ribbon spools and was faster than the MX-80. I believe it is about age contemporary. The Okidata could do pin feed; I don’t know if it could do roll paper.
@@wtmayhew Obsługiwała z odpowiednim podajnikiem, ale nie było to niezawodne jak ten teletype, Czasem za 4 razem udało się załadować dobrze papier. Reszta ok
@ Thank you for the reply. I never had to load the paper. It is not surprising to learn that it took four times to get the paper to load correctly. The design was not very user friendly.
I used to service those during my military service
Can never just plug it in and have it run, it's never that easy! LOL
Shuttle Interim Teleprinter… 3 letter acronym was likely mandatory for this device…
Four letters more likely…
Very cool
1.5 million dollars in expendable resources to launch this printer! Wow, those messages were valuable indeed.
No, they were not of any real value.
@ I probably should have put a /s on my remark. That’s typical government forest snd trees. Spend 1.5 million to launch a TTY, but bean count other stuff to Earth’s end.
its crazy if you think about the launch cost of 80000 Dollar for 1 Kg. thats 1920000 Dollars to lift this thing up in orbit
Huh... I probably would have gone with a off-the-shelf dot-matrix printer and a modem, due to weight issues.
NASA saw the first Alien movie in 79 and decided they needed a teletype printer on the shuttle as there was on Nostromo.
OMG, on the Shuttle?
My God, this sounds like one enormous bodge. Not really what you'd expect from Nasa. I suppose things had changed since the Apollo days.
Should have upgraded to a Commodore 64 and an Okidata printer. Then they could also make happy birthday banners.
Uuuh .. new toys! ;)
I have to take issue with those estimates of cost we always hear like how this cost 1.5mil to launch every time. Calculating the cost by dividing the total launch cost by total payload weight makes absolutely no sense since the launch was going to happen anyway whether this was on board or not, and whether it weighed 1lb or 500. As long as there was excess payload capacity available and the launch was already happening, the actual cost to launch an extra 52lbs would actually just be the cost of however much extra propellant required to get that extra 52 lbs to the same orbit. Using the rocket equation and the shuttle data, I calculate each additional lb required around 10-15lbs of excess propellant, so on the high end and using 90's prices, we're talking around $300-400 extra to launch that thing. Not bad at all IMO