"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses." --Bruce Leverett, _Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers_ (1983)
I printed my entire senior thesis (approx. 120 pages) on a similar device in 1980. Part of the thesis was in ancient Greek, and the device had a separate Greek print train largely at the request of mathematicians and physicists. Changing the print trains was a workout in itself.
You can re-ink that ribbon for sure. Dad (a chemist with good manual skills) made a ribbon re-inker with a little crank and gear for our Epson LX-80 cartridges. I can't remember what he used for ink, but I used to re-ink my mom's Royal typewriter ribbon (multi-pass, like your printer) with a stamp pad re-inker, which was a bottle of ink with a roller ball at the top, just like a roll-on deodorant bottle.
@@stephendouglas684 I actually couldn't believe how effective WD40 was for this. It just seemed like something someone randomly tried with whatever they had at their desk and it worked good enough, but MAN, I have brought back so many hard to find ribbons with regular WD40.
@tradde11 Agree it looks like (3) of the hammers have be moved around after the printer left the Data-100 factory. Also the one hammer with no witness mark line and just a large round dot is a Data-100 OEM replacement hammer that someone installed after the printer left the factory. All the "spare hammers" Centurion sold to the dealers are marked with the big dot when we received the part from Data-100.
The brush may be for static build up but it is more likely just to prevent paper dust, ink, or ribbon material from quickly filling the crevices on the characters. The IBM Mainframe printer we used to have a work that was similar to yours in construction and got a lot of use used to generate so much paper dust we had a specific weekly user cleaning schedule and a monthly deep clean schedule with the IBM engineer. Towards the end of its life the engineer clean was cancelled and we ended up having to scrub the character band with IPA spray and a toothbrush to keep characters legible. The character band rahter than a chain like on yours was a continuous steel band with the characters punched in it (think bandsaw blade but without blades).
I'm of the age where I remember these (and their bigger brothers) where in daily use for printing picking and delivery notes onto multipart NCR paper by the 1000's per day. IIRC we could push out 2000+ lines per minute when everything was running fine - you will have to get hold of a decollater and burster next! They had 24x7 cover as they were that vital to workflow and we had an on-site spare that got used for critical times like Easter and Christmas. Amazingly reliable units given the amount of work they had - regular use and maintenance (esp hoovering the paper dust out of them) was key. An operator (yup that was the job title) caught skipping the regular maintenance tasks 'came to see me'... When we operated at peak one printer only had uppercase characters, numbers and a selection of characters - much faster as the belt did not have to travel so far around to get to the character it needed! A couple of points: 1) Check the ribbon very carefully - some of the originals had a metal stop button or hole that told the system when to reverse the ribbon direction. These holes had a habit of getting clogged up with dust and ink (great glue) while the buttons occasionally fell off and both issues could lead to the ribbon tearing under strain. Cheaper 'compatible' ribbons often just had a hole that ripped after a few days of use 😞 2) The little brush was really to keep the paper dust off the heads - they could loose definition over time and needed a good clean. Static was normally handled by metal tinsel on the paper intake and the bars (you called it the arc cage) over which it exits. This was run to a grounding point on the printer. Thank you for the memories the sound resurfaced.
The video also reminded me of the decollator I had to use as a junior computer operator in a bank in London in the mid 1980's, I remember running through 5 or six boxes of paper per evening (5 till 11 shift) and making sure they were on desks for the morning before I left for the last train home. (Honeywell DPS6, can't remember the printer brand)
@@ChrisSmith-tc4df I worked in a office where we had a Printronix rebadged as a DEC printer. It was a 600 lpm printer and rock solid with minimal maintenance. My boss inexplicably replaced the Printronix with a printer actually made by DEC which was an awful printer that broke down constantly, and it was still only 600 lpm. DEC should have stayed out of the peripheral buiness because their in-house-made 9-track tape drive was also unreliable. We also had an HP-9000 with a tape drive which appeared to be made by Kennedy and that tape drive went 11 years with no maintenance other than normal cleaning.
I am trying to remember the model number of large refrigerator size IBM chain printers a bank where I interned was using but failing. Internet search finds the obvious IBM 1403 but the pictures don't quite match with what I remember. Maybe there were different variants.
@@JarkkoHietaniemi IBM had the 3800 “Argonaut” high volume laser printer family which became available about 1975. The 3800s used pin feed paper like a line printer but formed a latent image on the paper with a laser and then fused toner with a hot roller. I don’t know the speed, but it was probably thousands of lines per minute.
That fluorescent flicker (11:36) instantly transported us to any administrative or government office 50 years ago, (with ties and pens in the shirt pockets). 🙂
I was working in (non-governmental) offices shortly thereafter... And SOME of those lads even had the near-infamous 'pocket-protectors' too! Geek much?
21:07: I'm so glad you mentioned the carriage moving left to right, because it really really befuddled me how the line printer got 132 columns out of an arrangement of 33 + 33 hammers. The side-sliding is clearly the answer: With the carriage and every hammer on it having a left and right position, we get 2 x (33 + 33). Interestingly, per Wikipedia, the granddaddy of line printers, the IBM 1403, had 120 print positions (so 30 + 30 hammers). "An additional 12 positions were available as an option", meaning you could add on an extra 3 + 3 hammers, and the riced and maxed-out configuration then became the standard. _EGA VRAM vibes._
For even more fun Centurion also sold a 300 LPM "Drum Printer" from Control Data line printer with only 44 hammers for all 132 print columns. The CDC 9322 printer shifted the paper Left (print), Right (print) then Center (print) and repeat for the next line.... The cam system to shit the paper feed tractors Left, Right & Center used two paper tractor above the print drum and two more paper tractors below the print drum. The CDC 9322 was so loud it could be heard all over the office building.
@@loginregional Gotta adore Dr.Strangelove for the scene with Mandrake and the 1403 printer. That is so cool that Kubric didn’t try to use a blinky-light Hollywood prop computer. I remember seeing the movie when I was about eight years old and the realism freaked me out. It wasn’t until a few years later when I saw it again that I got the dark humor. For reasons unknown, Dr. Strangelove has become a sporadic Christmas Day tradition in our family, pulling out the Laser Disc every few years to watch again.
@@KameraShy I’m trying to remember my Fortran. I seem to recall something like 600 FORMAT 1H1 something or other and you’d specify to the printer in the PRINT(6, 600) statement using that FORMAT to interpret whatever was on the control tape - often a form feed. It has been about 60 years, so my recollection is a bit hazy. Unit 6 was usually the line printer.
Rule of traction printers. Sit and watch them , they dont jam/ run out of paper / fold the output the wrong way. Go for a tea-break and all and any of those problems happen
Back in the day, my university's terminal room had one of these beasts. I recall I wrote a C program to convert Commodore 64 color bitmaps into grayscale via characters, scaled it up and used the chain printer to print out wall sized graphic images (in horizontal bands of paper). Fun times!
At video time 16:04 the witness mark lines on the hammers looks like top hammer #17 was in bottom hammer position #33 when shipped from the factory. Also looks like top hammer #33 was at bottom #20 also when shipped from the factory. The current hammer in bottom #20 with a round dot ( no witness line ) is a purchased replacement hammer from Data-100. Looks like someone in the past was chasing a print problem before, the hammer did not fail often. Over looked issue the missed up the Field Engineers was the Mylar Hammer gaps broken (or with holes) and the Hammer Bank not moving to Odd then Even positions with a smooth rhythm like this Data-100 is having problems doing.
I used to have to service some extremely fast dot matrix printers. They were not as fast as that beast. But they were loud. So loud that most had to be in a noise absorbing cabinet, and even then, usually put in a room far away from people, because nobody wants a high speed dot matrix printer screaming near them. When working on those printers, i usually used double hearing protections. Ear plugs and ear muffs. That and the most common failures were mechanical, do to the violent movements of the print head. These printers in their noise absorbing enclosures would "walk" around, just due to the print head slamming back and forth. Although i must say the messiest repair was due to a pin getting stuck out, and it just shredded the ribbon into a bazillion pieces of crud that all had to be cleaned out. Took me days to wash that ink off of my hands...
Geez going that fast you'd think they would get one of those ones that just had all of the dots, big horizontal line and the paper just feeds past. Line matrix printer. That's it.
You should be able to re-ink the ribbon using an oil-based/'security' stamp pad ink (not a modern water-based ink that will dry out in days). WD40 works too as a temporary fix.
OMG, 'security' stamp pad ink is a thing? I have tried re-inking the felt ink rollers in vintage cipher machines (M-209, various other Hagelin machines) with stamp pad ink from Staples, and was frustrated by how quickly it dried out. I will try looking for oil based stamp pad ink.
@@Nf6xNetI'm not sure what they sell for stamp pad ink in 2024 but back in the 90s this was the way to revive otherwise functional printers that no longer had ribbons made for them. It's possible all stamp pad ink was oil based at that time. I don't remember this being marked on the bottles.
The systems I worked on in the 70s-80s mostly used Teletype model 30 mechanisms, also a chain-type mechanism, which were 300 LPM. The chain actually had 3 repetitions of characters on it, all-uppercase in the standard configuration but there was an option to have 2 sets of uppercase and 1 of lowercase, which allowed for printing lowercase as well, at lower speed. And there were 132 individual hammers, no shifting or repetition there.
You can get Mylar pretty easily too. In sheet form but still. Florist shops are a good source in a pinch but who knows what thickness that original is.
Just get some mylar and cut a new ribbon. Since film photography is a thing of the past you can probably find surplus mylar leader for 35mm films that can be cut to size fairly cheaply is my guess.
One of my first jobs out of college was a trainee operator on an ICL2966 mainframe, this room-sized machine had a pair of 1500lpm chain printers that were absolute beasts. First thing in the morning I had to hoover out both of them, clean what needed to be cleaned then sort out the paper stock room into single part and multipart paper for the daily jobs after the paper delivery. Make sure they didn't wreck when printing, then burst the individual print jobs and put them on the collection bench outside the computer suite. Fun times!
I just love this printer! Used to have a 132 cols IBM dot matrix one. It had the ability to hop around the shop making a hell of a racket but was incredibly fast
Those printers are built to last under heavy use for years, but only if a regular maintenance schedule is followed and obviously it's been sitting gaining dust for a long time well past it's normal service life, but it's amazing it's still almost working fully even after that and that says a lot for it's original build quality.
Need a 1401 N3. I was a DOS/VSE SP mainfr.ame operator for CDC back in the late 80s. There is nothing like an IBM chain printer. LOUD as hell. Loved that job.
What's the N3 for? Also, to my understanding there was a time when serious computers had two printers: A tty teleprinter and an lp line printer. Were you around back then?
My father has very fond memories of operating the Series/1 and the IBM band printers they had. 2 terminals and multiple tape drives. Running batch after batch of charges all so people got their bills on time.
Beautiful. Remember to keep as much lateral tension on the paper as you can by locking the tractor feeds far apart from each other. Old dry ones might slip around a bit on the bars they're connected to, super slippy ones won't help either. Keeping that paper in tension will help with post-print crinkling. Your paper is cool but seems pretty thick and heavy too! Was that how it was for these models? The mainframes I used took way thinner paper, and even the multi layer stuff was pretty flexible. Good luck!
I haven't worked on this model, but the printers I worked on you wouldn't use the tractors to put tension on the paper. If it was needed, there would be a clear plastic sheet in the throat that would push the paper into position. Since the printer would be pulling the paper from a box, the position of the paper coming into the printer will move forward and back.
For those people around in the 1980s (I know there are quite a few of us here...) this has almost the perfect sound and cadence for the opening part of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)'s track Genetic Engineering!
Ribbons Unlimited may be able to hook you up with a replacement ribbon, Lanie has helped me out with some obscure typewriter ones in the past. Even if they don't have spools you can replace the ribbon itself. Mineral spirits on a brush also works great for cleaning type faces, with a lot less cleanup needed than brake cleaner. Great to see this old beast up and running!
Part of my job at a university way back when was to service this printer every day. We replaced the ribbons, cleaned the cabinet, and loaded the paper. We had to vacuum out the cabinets every day to keep the paper dust down to a manageable level, because if you didn't do it the paper or mechanisms would get jammed up. Paper dust was a significant problem back then, especially since they were still using punch cards for programming. Paper dust was everywhere. And no, the vacuum didn't affect the operation of the printer - ever. The case lights were almost always burnt out, even when we replaced the bulbs. The vibration pretty much killed them in short order. We had over a hundred users on the system, so these printers were in constant use. The night before programs were due in computer programming classes or before finals they were running non-stop. Occasionally, we would have to kill several print jobs in the stack because of programs that were stuck in infinite loops, or ones that were in infinite loops and only printing one character per page. The latter could empty a full box of paper in under a minute. When loading a new box, you had to sacrifice a few sheets by advancing the paper far enough so that it fed through the case's paper guide and then out of the printer case. You had to advance it that far, otherwise the paper would jam up inside the printer case. We had to replace printer ribbons about once a week depending on how many people were on the system using the printers. On our printers, there was a switch located in the lower case where the paper was loaded, it was tucked up near the top front corner of the case by the door. I can't remember whether it was a paper advance button or a power/reset button.
Dollar signs don't mean anything without numbers. Besides, the binary representation of "$" (hex 24) is 00100100, which is symmetrical across the two nibbles.. I bet that's significant to making a simple electromechanical test.
It's also a sign the timing is correct. because every hammer needs to hit it at the correct time for the line to be correct. They could have chosen any symbol, but a $ is also reasonbly complex a symbol
@@bzuidgeest "$ is also reasonbly complex a symbol". That's a good point, since smeared "1" might go unnoticed. @ is also complex, but has all zeros in the lower nibble.
A general convention in the era of this machine (60's, 70's) was that dollar signs were used as a visible placeholder/marker/separator, something like # or @ or underscore would be used today. Such fancy characters often weren't available. Probably this chain included. $ is also ink-dense. Hammer strike or chain problems would be likely to show. So the use here in a test isn't surprising. For better or worse, I'm old enough to remember this from personal experience.
There's a certain element of bravery to deal with the physical aspects of a chain printer that can't be ignored. Well done,watching with anticipation on getting the final print!
That brush that contacts the chain may well be to prevent static electricity build up, but I'd guess that it's also to prevent general crud - paper dust & ink - from building up on the characters. A few general tips for refurbishing impact printers: 1) Ordinary Windex & a toothbrush works pretty well for removing ink residue; there's no need to use hazardous chemicals 2) Ribbons dry up over time. The classic trick for renewing a dried up ribbon like yours is to spray it lightly with WD40. In a situation like this, where it might be difficult to source a new ribbon, it'll give your ribbon at least enough life for testing. 3) To remove a belt that sets timing, such as your character chain, for cleaning, paint on alignment marks so that you can replace it with the exact same alignment that it started with. Back in the day, I used to keep a brightly coloured bottle of cheap nail polish in my toolkit for that purpose. It's also useful as dirt cheap substitute for Loctite to keep nuts & bolts from shaking loose from vibration.
Years ago I worked at a company that has some band printers. Similar to the chain printer only the symbols to print are on a metal band similar to a bandsaw blade. It had at least two sets of the symbols to help speed the printing it spit out pages per minute and had to be in an enclosure to keep the noise down.
Very similar memories of a lab I did maintenance for in the latter half of the '90s. If the printers weren't doing full filled lines they could spit out paper at an alarming rate.
@@retrozmachine1189 The company I was working at was printing ship manifests so there was a ton of paper through them daily. They also had some dot matrix printers that had two heads. One at the start of the line and one about halfway through to print the second half of the line. But the band printer that was fast and you change the bands to get different fonts. Someone bent one not putting it in correctly so that was $150 at the time to replace the band.
I worked at a place that concert off a mainframe to Oracle. They printed out the entire original DB2 database in the green and white bar wife format chain printer should they need it. I ran archives and I had a 10 ft high stack of some 40,000 pages from this thing I had to move around for years and no, nobody ever asked for any data from the old system
Used to print thousands of pages on Honeywell line printers back in the 1980s. You need to get 4 part paper with the carbon layer in between each page. But then you also need a decollator to separate the paper copies from the carbon. That was always a messy job back in the day. The Honeywell ones we used back then printed a page in a second or less. And yes, they were LOUD. I miss those days...
Sadly, I’ve never got to use or watch any of these printers in action. As a kid in the 1980s, I have used and seen plenty of dot matrix printers and I, to this day, still love the sound of an old dot matrix printer printing away.
I suspect (and from what others have commented, I believe I'm correct) that the carriage which was "vibrating" is supposed to move left and right, so that the hammers will hit alternate columns in order to give the full 132 columns from 66 hammers.
Correct. I once owned a Tally 2000 printer that used an oscillating 132 hammer array to print 5x7 dot matrix characters at high speed, on the same principle.
That carriage movement looks like compensation for the moving chain. So, move to one side, activate a hammer and simultaneously start moving towards the other side, deactivate hammer, rinse and repeat. Otherwise there's no way you could get a clean print with how fast the chain seems to be going.
A busy medical lab I did IT related maintenance for had 3 band printers in a converted fireproof room. They were fed with serial but the cabling could only handle 9600 which wasn't fast enough to keep them in flight with all the spaces in the printouts so we had to pull in some proper shielded cable and 38.4 or the like kept them happy. I think they were Dataproducts 300 lpm but they weren't my direct responsibility so maybe not. I do remember that they could do multiple strikes to the band (or was it just out of sequence strikes or perhaps a combination of both?) allowing simultaneous printing of multiple characters if things lined up to speed up printing. If they were stopped mid-stride you could see an incomplete line with characters across the full width of a line. I have a tickle of a memory that they may have even been dual row band so they actually filled out two lines simultaneously. Very noisy machines and the volume of paper they chomped through daily was impressive. Build up of paper dust in the machines was a problem.
When I came to what would be my last employer in 1989 one of my first jobs was to setup a network,. We had a couple of daisy wheel printers for department head's secretarial staff, senior staff's people had early HP laser printers and in accounting and IT we had two chain printers, Genicoms. When I retired in 2017 one of the two was still operational. Genicom's roots were Wang, Wang had a subsidiary called Centronics, the so called centronics port used for parallel printers was their creation, some time in the early 80s Wang spun them off. At some point Control Data merged its printer division with Centronics and CDC took control. In 1986 they sold off and it became Genicom. The machine was a tank spitting out ledgers in accounting and IT used it for any department that need long wide format print outs. It was hooked to our Novel Server and most staff had the right to use it through the network. When I retired one of the long term IT people did a banner for my retirement on it.
Two other thoughts The brush may be both for static and to try to brush some of the paper and fabric dust off the chain. We had special sheets that could be used to "clean" the chain. you took the ribbon out and fed it through like regular paper it was a bit fuzzy(?) And had a solvent on it that help dissolve the ink. May have drop off some to our favorite museum last year
I fondly remember when I was a kid, my mum was bank teller and was fascinated from a similar printer that used the same paper at her bank. There's just no sound quite like it ♥
Computing history! I was unaware of this type of printer. Sometime in the very late 80s or very early 90s I gained a matrix dot printer for my personal use in my office.
Oh this bring back some old memories and some PTSD!! I remember getting an upgrade to our line printers from IBM that had an "optimized" chain whereby the characters that were used more often were placed more frequently on the chain. The characters were not in sequence like they were on yours. I remember getting quite a printing performance improvement with those printer upgrades. One word of advice (in strong enough terms you get my point): do not print in your room with all the other precious equipment. I know you will not be printing much, but the paper dust gets EVERYWHERE and plugs up all the filters of all your precious other equipment. I'm sure you do not want paper dust to befall the Bendix rotating memory.
Awsome printer! The amount of mechanical parts that have to work in perfectly orchestration! The designers back then were really nuts... but it works. Btw. The cat at the end is adorable.
I remember getting my high school schedule and report cards that were printed on one of these. Were great for multipart carbon forms. The tell tale was always that the characters were always a little bit drunk, as all the letters were never quite on the same line, which is how you knew it was printed on one of these high speed chain character printers.
The mechanism reminds a bit of Hammond typewriters which used a similar hammer mechanism to smack the paper against the type element (semicircular "shuttles" in their case).
Extra points if the Centurion test program has an option to play music on the print hammers. We had several card decks for pop songs to play on the IBM 1403.
I can't remember the details on how, but back in the days of Epson FX80's, there were a couple of method of re-inking impact ribbons. One used Methylated Spirit to make the ink fluid again, the second added new ink to the ribbon, re-loading it with fresh ink. I've had a bit of a search on the Interweb and there are articles on both methods. Perhaps this is easier than replacing the ribbon. As to the material, it is just a length of material loaded in ink, so presumably not too difficult to replace if you needed to..
Last time, I mentioned our 1403. The ribbon for yours is tiny compared to the giant used here. Lesseeee, how wide is that carriage? 15 inches? by LENGTH. Consider a roll of inked fabric that wide by 20 meters. Or more. We never worried about that stuff. Back in '88 Hurst told me about the time he freaked out the accounts manager by presenting his general ledger on a freshly unpacked print 'ribbon' after that morning's run... OOPS. Your explanation of the print process and the mechanical miracles performed is outstanding. Good Job.
@ 20:17 - you should be able to adjust the lateral (side to side) paper tension by moving the drive cog assemblies slightly outwards. Usually has a locking clamp on clamp.
Hi! There was Genicom who did a shuttle printer until some 2 years ago where the print chain was replaced by an endless embossed steel ribbon with an oscillating hammer bank. I believe there might be still some of these in use today. Genicom was bought up by Printonics. Who still have this style printers today. May be work having a chat with them. But afaik most people operating these printers would just spool the ribben over manually and drench thevribbon in new ink. But I have not seen that kind re-inking station for a very long time (30 years). You might also talk to the german ink manufacturer Pelikan. I remember them selling even wider ribbons for shuttle printers. Maybe they have the type you need.
this was epic my friend. cant wait to see what you get done with this. it was nice to meet Sue. love the cute animals at the end. thanks for the name drop for the true stars of the show.
It has been very interesting and inspiring to look when you test and repair those old computer systems. I'd like to suggest that you try to find an old IBC (that company was in California) minicomputer like Cadet or Middi Cadet with Theos operating system (formerly it was named Oasis). I was using and maintaining those computers 40 years ago and still think that Theos was absolutely one of the best multiuser operating systems and unbelievably easy to use. I have very fond memories of those systems and would love to see some of them repaired into a working condition.
Hi and greeting from Germany. Cool what you doing. Nice and perfect job. You can put a heatschrink on your screwdriver for insolation. Keep going do a good job with this oldies😊
Funny I remember both sounds, spent many an hour working with this type of priter , when we heard the first sound we called the tech and he replaced the strip and we heard the second.
Weird how I miss that sound of printing... I remember back in 1978 having twelve printers do a major data dump. Thousands of pages. We had to keep a close eye on each printer and fix/adjust as they printed along. Was it ever noisy and my ears were ringing at the end of each day.
That carriage moving makes total sense! I was wondering how it can hit the "chain" and not smear or tear the paper, but when it hits that whole carriage moves with the chain slightly. I'd be curious as to what the signal looks like from the transducers / pickups / encoder on an oscilloscope and see if they are the source of the erratic carriage movement.
Tractor feed printers tend to accumulate paper particles (crumbs). I think its from the tractor feed yanking the paper up. So that little brush is probably trying to keep the letters clean(ish). You ought to try a line printer. They really fly.
Getting there! That chain based print head mechanism is crazy! SO different from a dot matrix or daisywheel or golf-ball style head I'm used to from that era...
Woohoo!! Great news!!! I had a feeling that the beast would be (mostly) able to run! Now it's a matter of tweaks for the most part and I hope you will show us all the fun! That is one noisy-ass printer, and one of the few pieces of hardware that sound louder then my old Amiga's external HDD that chattered like a typewriter you could hear 2 rooms away, if you could make it out over the sound of it's own fans. Anyway, Grats Dave!
Really nice. Congratulations. Takes me back. I learned programming on a Honeywell batch system that had a printer much like this. It ran pretty much continuously printing student jobs and iirc required a tech visit a couple of times a month to keep it going. Went through huge amounts of paper. Anyway, recommend you get a micrometer, measure the old mylar's thickness, and try to find a more exact replacement. E.g. strip mylar is sold for dental use. Maybe that would match. I can easily see the mechanism being under stress with a thicker material at that critical interface.
Takes me back to our 1982 startup. We needed a printer for our PDP-11. I found a Printronix chain printer used for $4000 which was a non-trivial portion of our startup capital. It worked well for many years, making its contribution to our startup’s success.
Printronix printers were pretty unstoppable. Minimal cleaning and occasional ribbon was enough to keep them going for years. Some products hit the magic Zen spot and that printer is such an example.
Back in the 90's there were Wells Fargo atm's (with the orange plasma displays) that used what I'm wondering if it's a chain printer. It would be a small one, for printing the transaction cards. I've always wanted to see that thing. Also I had a Casio calculator with a printer that used a rubber chain with a contact wheel for positioning, one hammer that moved like a typewriter (classic design).
You can use Ink pad ink to reink the printer ribbon. I have use it before when I need to make a printer work and not have a ribbon on hand. Looks like you on the way to getting it work out.
This brings back memories of working on a Printronix line printer. The dot matrix style that seems like it would be a lot more reliable than this chain type. It was still frustrating to keep working though.
I’m not sure if the print chain has rubber components, but it it does I would be wary of using brake cleaner on them! Great video, excited for the progress!
At the IRS, mid to late 1980s we had an impact printer similar to this with a black cloth ribbon. When ribbons like that appeared to be dried out, I would spray WD-40 on them and let it sit for a day or two and it would seem to refresh the ink.
You can make a teleprompter with 1 way glass in front of the camera at a 45 degree angle to an LCD with the brightness cranked up laid flat below. (I can see you looking to the left off camera to read cues)
You can pick up various thicknesses of Mylar/PET film from McMaster and other places. As for the ink ribbon... depending on what type of ink it uses, one trick that owners of alcohol markers will sometimes use to revitalize dried up markers is to moisten/soak the media with Ethanol and/or 99% Isopropanol (Copic markers use a mixture of approx ~80% Ethanol, ~10% 1-Propanol, 5% Isopropanol, 1% Toluene derivative)
I would consider replacing that Sprauge Powerlytic cap in the power supply, I’ve had problems with them shorting out power supplies for equipment in the past.
While I was working for the government back in the earlu '80s we used huge printers like this. I cant remember what they were called but they had large ribbons like this one. They rotated from left spool to right spool while printing. Changing the ribbons was very tedious. I found it easier to just lift the spool up and give it a short shot of WD40 right on the ribbon. Give it about 30 minutes to soak into the ribbon and away it went with very dark print. Save alot of time changing ribbons and needless to say, if replacement ribbons were low or out, this was an easy way to keep printing. I could sometimes get weeks worth of printing by using the WD method.
I worked with a DEC printer that looks like it used the same printer hardware... The tension between the pinfeeds was always very important and fiddley ... Also the proper paper path with no creasing when it folds over is important.
I think the shifting from left to right of the hammer assembly is some sort of compensation for the chain's movement because otherwise if the hammer hits the letter on the chain, it's going to tug the hammer to the side. The mylar strip may have been a way to mitigate that tugging but you're still looking at a lot of lateral forces. The issue may be that the shifting to compensate is out of calibration. Perhaps a video of the other Data-100 in operation can show how its supposed to look?
The Hammer Bank shifting from Even to Odd position is to reduce the overall printer cost. By having only 66 hammers for a 132 column printer reduced the cost of hammers & Hammer driver circuits by half. The speed of the hammer striking the paper into the character belt is many times faster than the horizontal belt speed.
I would definitely reach out to one of the local office supply stores (if any remain) and ask about having the ribbon re-inked. I'm sure they would have the means to do so or be able to point you in the right direction.
Good work! I like how that thing stands proud. Kinda bad-ass! Can't help but imagine a Moog generated 'WwAAOooMMMMM" if the printer suddenly appears in your computer room out of thin air.
I googled and found this info: If your typewriter uses a traditional ink ribbon, you can easily re-ink the ribbon yourself. Stamp pad ink is a great way to refresh a dry or well-used ribbon, but you can also use WD-40 to revitalize dried ink.
Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Since this ribbon may be unobtainum, the priority should be to preserve and not destroy it. WD-40 sounds like a BAD idea. Needs research into the type of ink used and that requires expertise.
Stamp pad ink, at least as it was sold in the 90s, will work fine. I remember the WD-40 method. It works until the ink runs out. It's not a real fix but might buy you some time if you don't have a replacement on hand. This old stuff if they really want ribbons... I believe this stuff, at least beyond the 60's was a cotton/polyester mix and literally the same stuff they would use for tying packages but soaked in stamp pad ink.
Fear of static in 70s equipment is almost nil until more of the MOS (metal-oxide) chips showed up. Thankfully we had drum printers which tended to run cleaner and less static. From what I can remember the metal brush on the chain also served to prevent ink build up. In the drums we had routine maintenance to take care of that and the static drains looked more like Christmas tinsel. What a "sonic" or "polyphonic" improvement with the Mylar in place.
I think this is more like the Internet legend of replacing all caps on old equipment. I worked on thousands of machines without a ground strap and never had a problem. Same way I used to work on old VCRs , stereos, and TVs and never changed all the caps. There are certain known failures that should be changed but not all of them blindly.
If you can’t find a replacement for that flouro tube, try driving it with a CCFL driver; my understanding is they operate like a stun gun by zapping the tube with a pulse of high voltage to ionize the mercury vapor, then maintain a lower voltage to keep the tube lit. The CCFL tubes don’t have filaments like regular flouro tubes. It’s sort of like what happens when you hold a flouro tube next to a plasma ball, or a Tesla coil. The other option is use an LED lighting strip. 😊
Way back in the day I used to repair printronix line matrix printers. Think of a dot matrix printer, with 66 pins arranged in a single horizontal line, that shifted the print head left and right 16 dots to get 132 columns of print. They could even print graphics with them
Manager: "Short of adding some firecrackers, how can we design a printer that is as noisy as humanly possible?" Engineer: "I think I got just the thing." lol
There is a bigger, meaner version of the chain line printer, the page printer. It has a full matrix of hammers for every column and row of the page, and a chain that has a full page full of rows of characters. The whole page is printed in one go, and it can shoot paper out at a phenomenal speed. As you can imagine, with so many hammers firing constantly, they're incredibly noisy. I was working for a UK company called Systime Computers, back in the 80s, when I saw these. Systime used to manufacture and sell DEC PDP and VAX clones, selling more than DEC UK at one time. I imagine these printers were a) stupid expensive and b) not made by Systime themselves, but I can't find any information from them online. Has anyone else out there even heard of these things?
Nice chain printer! Chain printers are like helicopters: the principle of operation is insane, but it works incredibly well!
They don't actually print. They beat the ink into submission to achieve lettering on paper.
Oh, hi, Marc.
@@Derpy1969 Hi doggy.
I love the sound these things make.
Probably has an auto-rotate procedure as well.
"Did that fix the problem?"
"No, but it changed it into a different problem."
Oh man that's always the way it goes
a classic
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses." --Bruce Leverett, _Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers_ (1983)
there's an XKCW comic of a guy coding and he says "YAY, finally a DIFFERENT compiler error message"
Coding in a nutshell
I printed my entire senior thesis (approx. 120 pages) on a similar device in 1980. Part of the thesis was in ancient Greek, and the device had a separate Greek print train largely at the request of mathematicians and physicists. Changing the print trains was a workout in itself.
You can re-ink that ribbon for sure. Dad (a chemist with good manual skills) made a ribbon re-inker with a little crank and gear for our Epson LX-80 cartridges. I can't remember what he used for ink, but I used to re-ink my mom's Royal typewriter ribbon (multi-pass, like your printer) with a stamp pad re-inker, which was a bottle of ink with a roller ball at the top, just like a roll-on deodorant bottle.
That's the best way. You can also use WD40 in a pinch.
Maybe those inks bottle refills for stamp pads works
@@eriksilveira9356 Yes endorsing ink at your local stationary store, or online. The one with oil in it works well. Very cheap, a bottle is around $1.
@@stephendouglas684 I actually couldn't believe how effective WD40 was for this. It just seemed like something someone randomly tried with whatever they had at their desk and it worked good enough, but MAN, I have brought back so many hard to find ribbons with regular WD40.
@@tomleech9753 WD40 likely just softens ink that has dried out. I would not use it as a permanent fix.
McMaster-Carr has all kinds of unique items like those strips you need. Look in the "raw materials" section. Excellent service too.
Notice the 2 witness lines on the hammer assembly. Showing that somebody has replaced 2 hammers at some point in the past
@tradde11 Agree it looks like (3) of the hammers have be moved around after the printer left the Data-100 factory. Also the one hammer with no witness mark line and just a large round dot is a Data-100 OEM replacement hammer that someone installed after the printer left the factory. All the "spare hammers" Centurion sold to the dealers are marked with the big dot when we received the part from Data-100.
The brush may be for static build up but it is more likely just to prevent paper dust, ink, or ribbon material from quickly filling the crevices on the characters. The IBM Mainframe printer we used to have a work that was similar to yours in construction and got a lot of use used to generate so much paper dust we had a specific weekly user cleaning schedule and a monthly deep clean schedule with the IBM engineer. Towards the end of its life the engineer clean was cancelled and we ended up having to scrub the character band with IPA spray and a toothbrush to keep characters legible. The character band rahter than a chain like on yours was a continuous steel band with the characters punched in it (think bandsaw blade but without blades).
I'm of the age where I remember these (and their bigger brothers) where in daily use for printing picking and delivery notes onto multipart NCR paper by the 1000's per day. IIRC we could push out 2000+ lines per minute when everything was running fine - you will have to get hold of a decollater and burster next! They had 24x7 cover as they were that vital to workflow and we had an on-site spare that got used for critical times like Easter and Christmas. Amazingly reliable units given the amount of work they had - regular use and maintenance (esp hoovering the paper dust out of them) was key. An operator (yup that was the job title) caught skipping the regular maintenance tasks 'came to see me'...
When we operated at peak one printer only had uppercase characters, numbers and a selection of characters - much faster as the belt did not have to travel so far around to get to the character it needed!
A couple of points:
1) Check the ribbon very carefully - some of the originals had a metal stop button or hole that told the system when to reverse the ribbon direction. These holes had a habit of getting clogged up with dust and ink (great glue) while the buttons occasionally fell off and both issues could lead to the ribbon tearing under strain. Cheaper 'compatible' ribbons often just had a hole that ripped after a few days of use 😞
2) The little brush was really to keep the paper dust off the heads - they could loose definition over time and needed a good clean. Static was normally handled by metal tinsel on the paper intake and the bars (you called it the arc cage) over which it exits. This was run to a grounding point on the printer.
Thank you for the memories the sound resurfaced.
My Printronix can print 2000lpm if a Draft-y enough font is chosen as it’s a line matrix rather than a chain printer.
The video also reminded me of the decollator I had to use as a junior computer operator in a bank in London in the mid 1980's, I remember running through 5 or six boxes of paper per evening (5 till 11 shift) and making sure they were on desks for the morning before I left for the last train home. (Honeywell DPS6, can't remember the printer brand)
@@ChrisSmith-tc4df I worked in a office where we had a Printronix rebadged as a DEC printer. It was a 600 lpm printer and rock solid with minimal maintenance. My boss inexplicably replaced the Printronix with a printer actually made by DEC which was an awful printer that broke down constantly, and it was still only 600 lpm. DEC should have stayed out of the peripheral buiness because their in-house-made 9-track tape drive was also unreliable. We also had an HP-9000 with a tape drive which appeared to be made by Kennedy and that tape drive went 11 years with no maintenance other than normal cleaning.
I am trying to remember the model number of large refrigerator size IBM chain printers a bank where I interned was using but failing. Internet search finds the obvious IBM 1403 but the pictures don't quite match with what I remember. Maybe there were different variants.
@@JarkkoHietaniemi IBM had the 3800 “Argonaut” high volume laser printer family which became available about 1975. The 3800s used pin feed paper like a line printer but formed a latent image on the paper with a laser and then fused toner with a hot roller. I don’t know the speed, but it was probably thousands of lines per minute.
That fluorescent flicker (11:36) instantly transported us to any administrative or government office 50 years ago, (with ties and pens in the shirt pockets). 🙂
I was working in (non-governmental) offices shortly thereafter... And SOME of those lads even had the near-infamous 'pocket-protectors' too!
Geek much?
@@trevorvanbremen4718 In my opinion, it's not very geeky, but pure common sense.
Engineering applied to saving shirts and trips to the laundry. 🙂
Fluorescent flicker like that always makes me think of the beginning of the movie Joe vs the Volcano. (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan)
21:07: I'm so glad you mentioned the carriage moving left to right, because it really really befuddled me how the line printer got 132 columns out of an arrangement of 33 + 33 hammers. The side-sliding is clearly the answer: With the carriage and every hammer on it having a left and right position, we get 2 x (33 + 33). Interestingly, per Wikipedia, the granddaddy of line printers, the IBM 1403, had 120 print positions (so 30 + 30 hammers). "An additional 12 positions were available as an option", meaning you could add on an extra 3 + 3 hammers, and the riced and maxed-out configuration then became the standard. _EGA VRAM vibes._
Upvote for mentioning the veritable WORK HORSE, the Fourteen Oh Three. Yeah, Kubrick knew about it.
For even more fun Centurion also sold a 300 LPM "Drum Printer" from Control Data line printer with only 44 hammers for all 132 print columns. The CDC 9322 printer shifted the paper Left (print), Right (print) then Center (print) and repeat for the next line.... The cam system to shit the paper feed tractors Left, Right & Center used two paper tractor above the print drum and two more paper tractors below the print drum. The CDC 9322 was so loud it could be heard all over the office building.
And, at least in the IBM World, the 133rd was the Carriage Control Character.
@@loginregional Gotta adore Dr.Strangelove for the scene with Mandrake and the 1403 printer. That is so cool that Kubric didn’t try to use a blinky-light Hollywood prop computer. I remember seeing the movie when I was about eight years old and the realism freaked me out. It wasn’t until a few years later when I saw it again that I got the dark humor. For reasons unknown, Dr. Strangelove has become a sporadic Christmas Day tradition in our family, pulling out the Laser Disc every few years to watch again.
@@KameraShy I’m trying to remember my Fortran. I seem to recall something like 600 FORMAT 1H1 something or other and you’d specify to the printer in the PRINT(6, 600) statement using that FORMAT to interpret whatever was on the control tape - often a form feed. It has been about 60 years, so my recollection is a bit hazy. Unit 6 was usually the line printer.
Rule of traction printers. Sit and watch them , they dont jam/ run out of paper / fold the output the wrong way. Go for a tea-break and all and any of those problems happen
that's the rule for 3d printers too in my experience
Back in the day, my university's terminal room had one of these beasts. I recall I wrote a C program to convert Commodore 64 color bitmaps into grayscale via characters, scaled it up and used the chain printer to print out wall sized graphic images (in horizontal bands of paper). Fun times!
I hope the printer series makes a big… impact
There it is
Alright you. In the corner. Now. And think about what you've done.
The results are going to be impressive for certain. It's probably going to have a lot of character.
It will be...hammer time.
I mean, no one's gonna top that!
At video time 16:04 the witness mark lines on the hammers looks like top hammer #17 was in bottom hammer position #33 when shipped from the factory. Also looks like top hammer #33 was at bottom #20 also when shipped from the factory. The current hammer in bottom #20 with a round dot ( no witness line ) is a purchased replacement hammer from Data-100. Looks like someone in the past was chasing a print problem before, the hammer did not fail often. Over looked issue the missed up the Field Engineers was the Mylar Hammer gaps broken (or with holes) and the Hammer Bank not moving to Odd then Even positions with a smooth rhythm like this Data-100 is having problems doing.
I used to have to service some extremely fast dot matrix printers. They were not as fast as that beast. But they were loud. So loud that most had to be in a noise absorbing cabinet, and even then, usually put in a room far away from people, because nobody wants a high speed dot matrix printer screaming near them.
When working on those printers, i usually used double hearing protections. Ear plugs and ear muffs. That and the most common failures were mechanical, do to the violent movements of the print head. These printers in their noise absorbing enclosures would "walk" around, just due to the print head slamming back and forth.
Although i must say the messiest repair was due to a pin getting stuck out, and it just shredded the ribbon into a bazillion pieces of crud that all had to be cleaned out. Took me days to wash that ink off of my hands...
Geez going that fast you'd think they would get one of those ones that just had all of the dots, big horizontal line and the paper just feeds past.
Line matrix printer. That's it.
You should be able to re-ink the ribbon using an oil-based/'security' stamp pad ink (not a modern water-based ink that will dry out in days). WD40 works too as a temporary fix.
OMG, 'security' stamp pad ink is a thing? I have tried re-inking the felt ink rollers in vintage cipher machines (M-209, various other Hagelin machines) with stamp pad ink from Staples, and was frustrated by how quickly it dried out. I will try looking for oil based stamp pad ink.
@@Nf6xNetI'm not sure what they sell for stamp pad ink in 2024 but back in the 90s this was the way to revive otherwise functional printers that no longer had ribbons made for them. It's possible all stamp pad ink was oil based at that time. I don't remember this being marked on the bottles.
@@Nf6xNet I just did a quick search and it looks like oil-based stamp refill ink is still readily available from a bunch of different places.
The systems I worked on in the 70s-80s mostly used Teletype model 30 mechanisms, also a chain-type mechanism, which were 300 LPM. The chain actually had 3 repetitions of characters on it, all-uppercase in the standard configuration but there was an option to have 2 sets of uppercase and 1 of lowercase, which allowed for printing lowercase as well, at lower speed. And there were 132 individual hammers, no shifting or repetition there.
I feel nostalgic for fan-folded line printer paper. When coding it used to be the ideal medium for scribbling out ideas on the back of old printouts.
You can get Kapton tape in just about any thickness and width. Could maybe be a replacement for the mylar. Without the adhesive, of course
You can get Mylar pretty easily too.
In sheet form but still.
Florist shops are a good source in a pinch but who knows what thickness that original is.
Just get some mylar and cut a new ribbon. Since film photography is a thing of the past you can probably find surplus mylar leader for 35mm films that can be cut to size fairly cheaply is my guess.
One of my first jobs out of college was a trainee operator on an ICL2966 mainframe, this room-sized machine had a pair of 1500lpm chain printers that were absolute beasts. First thing in the morning I had to hoover out both of them, clean what needed to be cleaned then sort out the paper stock room into single part and multipart paper for the daily jobs after the paper delivery. Make sure they didn't wreck when printing, then burst the individual print jobs and put them on the collection bench outside the computer suite. Fun times!
I just love this printer! Used to have a 132 cols IBM dot matrix one. It had the ability to hop around the shop making a hell of a racket but was incredibly fast
Beware YT unsubscribed us! I just wanted to say I love seeing how fellow YT users share information and great job on the printers recovery.
Those printers are built to last under heavy use for years, but only if a regular maintenance schedule is followed and obviously it's been sitting gaining dust for a long time well past it's normal service life, but it's amazing it's still almost working fully even after that and that says a lot for it's original build quality.
Need a 1401 N3. I was a DOS/VSE SP mainfr.ame operator for CDC back in the late 80s. There is nothing like an IBM chain printer. LOUD as hell. Loved that job.
What's the N3 for?
Also, to my understanding there was a time when serious computers had two printers: A tty teleprinter and an lp line printer. Were you around back then?
My father has very fond memories of operating the Series/1 and the IBM band printers they had. 2 terminals and multiple tape drives.
Running batch after batch of charges all so people got their bills on time.
Beautiful. Remember to keep as much lateral tension on the paper as you can by locking the tractor feeds far apart from each other. Old dry ones might slip around a bit on the bars they're connected to, super slippy ones won't help either. Keeping that paper in tension will help with post-print crinkling. Your paper is cool but seems pretty thick and heavy too! Was that how it was for these models? The mainframes I used took way thinner paper, and even the multi layer stuff was pretty flexible. Good luck!
I haven't worked on this model, but the printers I worked on you wouldn't use the tractors to put tension on the paper. If it was needed, there would be a clear plastic sheet in the throat that would push the paper into position. Since the printer would be pulling the paper from a box, the position of the paper coming into the printer will move forward and back.
For those people around in the 1980s (I know there are quite a few of us here...) this has almost the perfect sound and cadence for the opening part of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)'s track Genetic Engineering!
Ribbons Unlimited may be able to hook you up with a replacement ribbon, Lanie has helped me out with some obscure typewriter ones in the past. Even if they don't have spools you can replace the ribbon itself.
Mineral spirits on a brush also works great for cleaning type faces, with a lot less cleanup needed than brake cleaner.
Great to see this old beast up and running!
Back when I did this stuff for a living, I found that Windex & a toothbrush worked well for cleaning the ink & paper dust build up out of type faces.
Part of my job at a university way back when was to service this printer every day. We replaced the ribbons, cleaned the cabinet, and loaded the paper. We had to vacuum out the cabinets every day to keep the paper dust down to a manageable level, because if you didn't do it the paper or mechanisms would get jammed up. Paper dust was a significant problem back then, especially since they were still using punch cards for programming. Paper dust was everywhere. And no, the vacuum didn't affect the operation of the printer - ever.
The case lights were almost always burnt out, even when we replaced the bulbs. The vibration pretty much killed them in short order.
We had over a hundred users on the system, so these printers were in constant use. The night before programs were due in computer programming classes or before finals they were running non-stop. Occasionally, we would have to kill several print jobs in the stack because of programs that were stuck in infinite loops, or ones that were in infinite loops and only printing one character per page. The latter could empty a full box of paper in under a minute. When loading a new box, you had to sacrifice a few sheets by advancing the paper far enough so that it fed through the case's paper guide and then out of the printer case. You had to advance it that far, otherwise the paper would jam up inside the printer case. We had to replace printer ribbons about once a week depending on how many people were on the system using the printers. On our printers, there was a switch located in the lower case where the paper was loaded, it was tucked up near the top front corner of the case by the door. I can't remember whether it was a paper advance button or a power/reset button.
I really like your old shopvac. Cute little thing.
Wonderful! Now I'm waiting to see it print Hellorld :)
which it will in a fraction of a second
I like that the test print just shows $ signs! For sure in a commercial environment that’s the only character they’re interested in!
Dollar signs don't mean anything without numbers.
Besides, the binary representation of "$" (hex 24) is 00100100, which is symmetrical across the two nibbles.. I bet that's significant to making a simple electromechanical test.
It's also a sign the timing is correct. because every hammer needs to hit it at the correct time for the line to be correct. They could have chosen any symbol, but a $ is also reasonbly complex a symbol
@@bzuidgeest "$ is also reasonbly complex a symbol".
That's a good point, since smeared "1" might go unnoticed.
@ is also complex, but has all zeros in the lower nibble.
A general convention in the era of this machine (60's, 70's) was that dollar signs were used as a visible placeholder/marker/separator, something like # or @ or underscore would be used today. Such fancy characters often weren't available. Probably this chain included. $ is also ink-dense. Hammer strike or chain problems would be likely to show. So the use here in a test isn't surprising. For better or worse, I'm old enough to remember this from personal experience.
@@generessler6282 Yup - also has a bar down the middle which might help with checking alignment
There's a certain element of bravery to deal with the physical aspects of a chain printer that can't be ignored. Well done,watching with anticipation on getting the final print!
That brush that contacts the chain may well be to prevent static electricity build up, but I'd guess that it's also to prevent general crud - paper dust & ink - from building up on the characters.
A few general tips for refurbishing impact printers:
1) Ordinary Windex & a toothbrush works pretty well for removing ink residue; there's no need to use hazardous chemicals
2) Ribbons dry up over time. The classic trick for renewing a dried up ribbon like yours is to spray it lightly with WD40. In a situation like this, where it might be difficult to source a new ribbon, it'll give your ribbon at least enough life for testing.
3) To remove a belt that sets timing, such as your character chain, for cleaning, paint on alignment marks so that you can replace it with the exact same alignment that it started with. Back in the day, I used to keep a brightly coloured bottle of cheap nail polish in my toolkit for that purpose. It's also useful as dirt cheap substitute for Loctite to keep nuts & bolts from shaking loose from vibration.
Awesome Indeed! you almost have the old Beast running like clockwork again! 😀👍
I love tinkering with Electronics and Mechanical things also ❤
Years ago I worked at a company that has some band printers. Similar to the chain printer only the symbols to print are on a metal band similar to a bandsaw blade. It had at least two sets of the symbols to help speed the printing it spit out pages per minute and had to be in an enclosure to keep the noise down.
Very similar memories of a lab I did maintenance for in the latter half of the '90s. If the printers weren't doing full filled lines they could spit out paper at an alarming rate.
@@retrozmachine1189 The company I was working at was printing ship manifests so there was a ton of paper through them daily. They also had some dot matrix printers that had two heads. One at the start of the line and one about halfway through to print the second half of the line. But the band printer that was fast and you change the bands to get different fonts. Someone bent one not putting it in correctly so that was $150 at the time to replace the band.
I worked at a place that concert off a mainframe to Oracle. They printed out the entire original DB2 database in the green and white bar wife format chain printer should they need it. I ran archives and I had a 10 ft high stack of some 40,000 pages from this thing I had to move around for years and no, nobody ever asked for any data from the old system
Used to print thousands of pages on Honeywell line printers back in the 1980s. You need to get 4 part paper with the carbon layer in between each page. But then you also need a decollator to separate the paper copies from the carbon. That was always a messy job back in the day. The Honeywell ones we used back then printed a page in a second or less. And yes, they were LOUD. I miss those days...
Sadly, I’ve never got to use or watch any of these printers in action. As a kid in the 1980s, I have used and seen plenty of dot matrix printers and I, to this day, still love the sound of an old dot matrix printer printing away.
Veronica Explains channel is a fan of vintage dot-matrix printers.
In practice, having your desk next to a printer was hard
The only thing better than your excitement is the animals! Keep up the great work!
The diagonal ribbon alignment reminds me of a helical scan VTR - sort of...
The Mylar strip will help with residual magnetism between the hammers and coil .
Yes. It keeps the hammers from sticking to the armature of the drive coil.
I suspect (and from what others have commented, I believe I'm correct) that the carriage which was "vibrating" is supposed to move left and right, so that the hammers will hit alternate columns in order to give the full 132 columns from 66 hammers.
Correct. I once owned a Tally 2000 printer that used an oscillating 132 hammer array to print 5x7 dot matrix characters at high speed, on the same principle.
That carriage movement looks like compensation for the moving chain. So, move to one side, activate a hammer and simultaneously start moving towards the other side, deactivate hammer, rinse and repeat. Otherwise there's no way you could get a clean print with how fast the chain seems to be going.
On the other hand, chain printers weren't known for clean printing.
A busy medical lab I did IT related maintenance for had 3 band printers in a converted fireproof room. They were fed with serial but the cabling could only handle 9600 which wasn't fast enough to keep them in flight with all the spaces in the printouts so we had to pull in some proper shielded cable and 38.4 or the like kept them happy.
I think they were Dataproducts 300 lpm but they weren't my direct responsibility so maybe not. I do remember that they could do multiple strikes to the band (or was it just out of sequence strikes or perhaps a combination of both?) allowing simultaneous printing of multiple characters if things lined up to speed up printing. If they were stopped mid-stride you could see an incomplete line with characters across the full width of a line. I have a tickle of a memory that they may have even been dual row band so they actually filled out two lines simultaneously.
Very noisy machines and the volume of paper they chomped through daily was impressive. Build up of paper dust in the machines was a problem.
When I came to what would be my last employer in 1989 one of my first jobs was to setup a network,. We had a couple of daisy wheel printers for department head's secretarial staff, senior staff's people had early HP laser printers and in accounting and IT we had two chain printers, Genicoms. When I retired in 2017 one of the two was still operational. Genicom's roots were Wang, Wang had a subsidiary called Centronics, the so called centronics port used for parallel printers was their creation, some time in the early 80s Wang spun them off. At some point Control Data merged its printer division with Centronics and CDC took control. In 1986 they sold off and it became Genicom.
The machine was a tank spitting out ledgers in accounting and IT used it for any department that need long wide format print outs. It was hooked to our Novel Server and most staff had the right to use it through the network. When I retired one of the long term IT people did a banner for my retirement on it.
Two other thoughts
The brush may be both for static and to try to brush some of the paper and fabric dust off the chain.
We had special sheets that could be used to "clean" the chain. you took the ribbon out and fed it through like regular paper it was a bit fuzzy(?) And had a solvent on it that help dissolve the ink.
May have drop off some to our favorite museum last year
"...precision timing and directed violence and I love it"😂
Watching your cleaning work..... A good job done well, is always worth doing!
I fondly remember when I was a kid, my mum was bank teller and was fascinated from a similar printer that used the same paper at her bank. There's just no sound quite like it ♥
Computing history! I was unaware of this type of printer. Sometime in the very late 80s or very early 90s I gained a matrix dot printer for my personal use in my office.
Oh this bring back some old memories and some PTSD!!
I remember getting an upgrade to our line printers from IBM that had an "optimized" chain whereby the characters that were used more often were placed more frequently on the chain. The characters were not in sequence like they were on yours. I remember getting quite a printing performance improvement with those printer upgrades.
One word of advice (in strong enough terms you get my point): do not print in your room with all the other precious equipment. I know you will not be printing much, but the paper dust gets EVERYWHERE and plugs up all the filters of all your precious other equipment. I'm sure you do not want paper dust to befall the Bendix rotating memory.
Awsome printer! The amount of mechanical parts that have to work in perfectly orchestration! The designers back then were really nuts... but it works.
Btw. The cat at the end is adorable.
I remember getting my high school schedule and report cards that were printed on one of these. Were great for multipart carbon forms. The tell tale was always that the characters were always a little bit drunk, as all the letters were never quite on the same line, which is how you knew it was printed on one of these high speed chain character printers.
The mechanism reminds a bit of Hammond typewriters which used a similar hammer mechanism to smack the paper against the type element (semicircular "shuttles" in their case).
Extra points if the Centurion test program has an option to play music on the print hammers. We had several card decks for pop songs to play on the IBM 1403.
12:04 priceless reaction
I can't remember the details on how, but back in the days of Epson FX80's, there were a couple of method of re-inking impact ribbons. One used Methylated Spirit to make the ink fluid again, the second added new ink to the ribbon, re-loading it with fresh ink. I've had a bit of a search on the Interweb and there are articles on both methods. Perhaps this is easier than replacing the ribbon. As to the material, it is just a length of material loaded in ink, so presumably not too difficult to replace if you needed to..
Last time, I mentioned our 1403. The ribbon for yours is tiny compared to the giant used here. Lesseeee, how wide is that carriage? 15 inches? by LENGTH. Consider a roll of inked fabric that wide by 20 meters. Or more. We never worried about that stuff. Back in '88 Hurst told me about the time he freaked out the accounts manager by presenting his general ledger on a freshly unpacked print 'ribbon' after that morning's run... OOPS. Your explanation of the print process and the mechanical miracles performed is outstanding. Good Job.
@ 20:17 - you should be able to adjust the lateral (side to side) paper tension by moving the drive cog assemblies slightly outwards. Usually has a locking clamp on clamp.
Hi!
There was Genicom who did a shuttle printer until some 2 years ago where the print chain was replaced by an endless embossed steel ribbon with an oscillating hammer bank.
I believe there might be still some of these in use today.
Genicom was bought up by Printonics. Who still have this style printers today. May be work having a chat with them.
But afaik most people operating these printers would just spool the ribben over manually and drench thevribbon in new ink. But I have not seen that kind re-inking station for a very long time (30 years). You might also talk to the german ink manufacturer Pelikan. I remember them selling even wider ribbons for shuttle printers. Maybe they have the type you need.
this was epic my friend. cant wait to see what you get done with this. it was nice to meet Sue. love the cute animals at the end. thanks for the name drop for the true stars of the show.
It has been very interesting and inspiring to look when you test and repair those old computer systems. I'd like to suggest that you try to find an old IBC (that company was in California) minicomputer like Cadet or Middi Cadet with Theos operating system (formerly it was named Oasis). I was using and maintaining those computers 40 years ago and still think that Theos was absolutely one of the best multiuser operating systems and unbelievably easy to use. I have very fond memories of those systems and would love to see some of them repaired into a working condition.
Hi and greeting from Germany. Cool what you doing. Nice and perfect job. You can put a heatschrink on your screwdriver for insolation. Keep going do a good job with this oldies😊
Funny I remember both sounds, spent many an hour working with this type of priter , when we heard the first sound we called the tech and he replaced the strip and we heard the second.
Weird how I miss that sound of printing... I remember back in 1978 having twelve printers do a major data dump. Thousands of pages. We had to keep a close eye on each printer and fix/adjust as they printed along. Was it ever noisy and my ears were ringing at the end of each day.
I Cleaned the heads with Isopropanol on my dot matrix printer helped quiet with the Sticking
That carriage moving makes total sense! I was wondering how it can hit the "chain" and not smear or tear the paper, but when it hits that whole carriage moves with the chain slightly. I'd be curious as to what the signal looks like from the transducers / pickups / encoder on an oscilloscope and see if they are the source of the erratic carriage movement.
Tractor feed printers tend to accumulate paper particles (crumbs). I think its from the tractor feed yanking the paper up. So that little brush is probably trying to keep the letters clean(ish). You ought to try a line printer. They really fly.
Getting there! That chain based print head mechanism is crazy! SO different from a dot matrix or daisywheel or golf-ball style head I'm used to from that era...
Woohoo!! Great news!!! I had a feeling that the beast would be (mostly) able to run! Now it's a matter of tweaks for the most part and I hope you will show us all the fun! That is one noisy-ass printer, and one of the few pieces of hardware that sound louder then my old Amiga's external HDD that chattered like a typewriter you could hear 2 rooms away, if you could make it out over the sound of it's own fans. Anyway, Grats Dave!
Really nice. Congratulations. Takes me back. I learned programming on a Honeywell batch system that had a printer much like this. It ran pretty much continuously printing student jobs and iirc required a tech visit a couple of times a month to keep it going. Went through huge amounts of paper. Anyway, recommend you get a micrometer, measure the old mylar's thickness, and try to find a more exact replacement. E.g. strip mylar is sold for dental use. Maybe that would match. I can easily see the mechanism being under stress with a thicker material at that critical interface.
Takes me back to our 1982 startup. We needed a printer for our PDP-11. I found a Printronix chain printer used for $4000 which was a non-trivial portion of our startup capital. It worked well for many years, making its contribution to our startup’s success.
Printronix printers were pretty unstoppable. Minimal cleaning and occasional ribbon was enough to keep them going for years. Some products hit the magic Zen spot and that printer is such an example.
Back in the 90's there were Wells Fargo atm's (with the orange plasma displays) that used what I'm wondering if it's a chain printer. It would be a small one, for printing the transaction cards. I've always wanted to see that thing. Also I had a Casio calculator with a printer that used a rubber chain with a contact wheel for positioning, one hammer that moved like a typewriter (classic design).
You can use Ink pad ink to reink the printer ribbon. I have use it before when I need to make a printer work and not have a ribbon on hand. Looks like you on the way to getting it work out.
The small brush on a post is to remove ink gunk from characters (see your typewriter "pencil" , these have a similar end )
This brings back memories of working on a Printronix line printer. The dot matrix style that seems like it would be a lot more reliable than this chain type. It was still frustrating to keep working though.
That test print looks like money.
I’m not sure if the print chain has rubber components, but it it does I would be wary of using brake cleaner on them!
Great video, excited for the progress!
At the IRS, mid to late 1980s we had an impact printer similar to this with a black cloth ribbon. When ribbons like that appeared to be dried out, I would spray WD-40 on them and let it sit for a day or two and it would seem to refresh the ink.
You can make a teleprompter with 1 way glass in front of the camera at a 45 degree angle to an LCD with the brightness cranked up laid flat below. (I can see you looking to the left off camera to read cues)
You can pick up various thicknesses of Mylar/PET film from McMaster and other places. As for the ink ribbon... depending on what type of ink it uses, one trick that owners of alcohol markers will sometimes use to revitalize dried up markers is to moisten/soak the media with Ethanol and/or 99% Isopropanol (Copic markers use a mixture of approx ~80% Ethanol, ~10% 1-Propanol, 5% Isopropanol, 1% Toluene derivative)
WD40 is the traditional fix for dried out ribbons.
I would consider replacing that Sprauge Powerlytic cap in the power supply, I’ve had problems with them shorting out power supplies for equipment in the past.
While I was working for the government back in the earlu '80s we used huge printers like this. I cant remember what they were called but they had large ribbons like this one. They rotated from left spool to right spool while printing. Changing the ribbons was very tedious. I found it easier to just lift the spool up and give it a short shot of WD40 right on the ribbon. Give it about 30 minutes to soak into the ribbon and away it went with very dark print. Save alot of time changing ribbons and needless to say, if replacement ribbons were low or out, this was an easy way to keep printing. I could sometimes get weeks worth of printing by using the WD method.
This was nice to see. Maybe the carriage moving erratically may be a failing part which controls it. Could be a driver which has issues
I worked with a DEC printer that looks like it used the same printer hardware... The tension between the pinfeeds was always very important and fiddley ... Also the proper paper path with no creasing when it folds over is important.
I think the shifting from left to right of the hammer assembly is some sort of compensation for the chain's movement because otherwise if the hammer hits the letter on the chain, it's going to tug the hammer to the side. The mylar strip may have been a way to mitigate that tugging but you're still looking at a lot of lateral forces.
The issue may be that the shifting to compensate is out of calibration. Perhaps a video of the other Data-100 in operation can show how its supposed to look?
The Hammer Bank shifting from Even to Odd position is to reduce the overall printer cost. By having only 66 hammers for a 132 column printer reduced the cost of hammers & Hammer driver circuits by half. The speed of the hammer striking the paper into the character belt is many times faster than the horizontal belt speed.
I would definitely reach out to one of the local office supply stores (if any remain) and ask about having the ribbon re-inked. I'm sure they would have the means to do so or be able to point you in the right direction.
Good work! I like how that thing stands proud. Kinda bad-ass! Can't help but imagine a Moog generated 'WwAAOooMMMMM" if the printer suddenly appears in your computer room out of thin air.
also, for ESD, I'm sure that a solid ground on the chassis would be a good step.
I googled and found this info:
If your typewriter uses a traditional ink ribbon, you can easily re-ink the ribbon yourself. Stamp pad ink is a great way to refresh a dry or well-used ribbon, but you can also use WD-40 to revitalize dried ink.
Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Since this ribbon may be unobtainum, the priority should be to preserve and not destroy it. WD-40 sounds like a BAD idea. Needs research into the type of ink used and that requires expertise.
Stamp pad ink, at least as it was sold in the 90s, will work fine. I remember the WD-40 method. It works until the ink runs out. It's not a real fix but might buy you some time if you don't have a replacement on hand.
This old stuff if they really want ribbons... I believe this stuff, at least beyond the 60's was a cotton/polyester mix and literally the same stuff they would use for tying packages but soaked in stamp pad ink.
Fear of static in 70s equipment is almost nil until more of the MOS (metal-oxide) chips showed up. Thankfully we had drum printers which tended to run cleaner and less static. From what I can remember the metal brush on the chain also served to prevent ink build up. In the drums we had routine maintenance to take care of that and the static drains looked more like Christmas tinsel. What a "sonic" or "polyphonic" improvement with the Mylar in place.
I think this is more like the Internet legend of replacing all caps on old equipment. I worked on thousands of machines without a ground strap and never had a problem. Same way I used to work on old VCRs , stereos, and TVs and never changed all the caps.
There are certain known failures that should be changed but not all of them blindly.
What a fun episode to watch!
I am so impressed that your cat waded into that water! Also the printer progress is somewhat awesome.
I like Manx :-) We had a few when I was a kid, always thought of their rear-ends as sort of being hot-rodded; lose the tail but jack up those legs!
7:08 - soak it with new ink. I guess they still sell inks for dotmatrix printers
If you can’t find a replacement for that flouro tube, try driving it with a CCFL driver; my understanding is they operate like a stun gun by zapping the tube with a pulse of high voltage to ionize the mercury vapor, then maintain a lower voltage to keep the tube lit. The CCFL tubes don’t have filaments like regular flouro tubes. It’s sort of like what happens when you hold a flouro tube next to a plasma ball, or a Tesla coil. The other option is use an LED lighting strip. 😊
Way back in the day I used to repair printronix line matrix printers. Think of a dot matrix printer, with 66 pins arranged in a single horizontal line, that shifted the print head left and right 16 dots to get 132 columns of print. They could even print graphics with them
Manager: "Short of adding some firecrackers, how can we design a printer that is as noisy as humanly possible?"
Engineer: "I think I got just the thing." lol
Awesome that it works so well after the first pass restoration work.
There is a bigger, meaner version of the chain line printer, the page printer. It has a full matrix of hammers for every column and row of the page, and a chain that has a full page full of rows of characters. The whole page is printed in one go, and it can shoot paper out at a phenomenal speed. As you can imagine, with so many hammers firing constantly, they're incredibly noisy. I was working for a UK company called Systime Computers, back in the 80s, when I saw these. Systime used to manufacture and sell DEC PDP and VAX clones, selling more than DEC UK at one time. I imagine these printers were a) stupid expensive and b) not made by Systime themselves, but I can't find any information from them online. Has anyone else out there even heard of these things?
IT'S WHISPER QUIET!
For real though, this is great stuff.
I used those during my physics studies! VAX during Bac, then Uni upgraded to SGI server just in time for my M.Sc. (was doing molecular dynamics)