Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Re: "Has a foreign body caused you grief?"

An all too common story.

Re: "Has a foreign body caused you grief?"

I think you just b0rked my parser.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

"Can't remember the last time I saw anyone else use carbon paper."

As recently as yesterday evening. Should have been a month ago but my local Civic Society couldn't take subscriptions because the carbon in their receipt book had worn out! They've now got a new sheet.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

I keep some stashed away for model making projects, It's damn useful for tracing patterns onto sheet plastic.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

I keep a half dozen sheets of carbon paper in my shop. Great stuff for finding where you need to file or sand to fit parts properly. Useful for transferring measurements from part to paper as well.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

I deeply approve of carbon paper..now what was the good brand I couldn't get any of my employers to buy, the one with a look of a large After Eight mint to it. Those carbons really did triplicate..and who remembers the quadruplicate wads of stencils for the Gestetner? This was classy carbon, taking the imprint via a bullet stub intermediate sheet, that blunted your Imperial typewriter's cutting edge.

Bring carbon copies back!

Why?

Analog is harder to forge.

Even camera sensors are fingerprinted by their analog ADC traces. Anna is good. With a typewriter.

Re: Speaking of carbon paper...

anyone remeber last year's Microsoft borking of Epson Dot Matrix printers - 1600 doctor's perscription printers in Republic of Ireland affected; carbons still required

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/windows_update_killed_my_printer/

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Maybe once a week, I hear the dot-matrix printer in our office fire up. Apparently there are certain forms (for a regulator, I think) that have to be filled out in carbonless triplicate, which simply isn't possible on a laser/inkjet. So, it's 2018, and we have, and use, a tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. I hear there's a way of submitting the info electronically, but that we're not quite ready for that yet.

(AC to hide the guilty (and current) employer)

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

"I remember carbon paper, stuff printed in triplicate. So messy separating the 3 prints from the sandwiched carbon papers."

Worst I saw was 7 part self-carbon. Cust reported the printer kept jamming. Adjusted printhead gap and generally cleaned/lubed the printer and got it working but told the cust the printer was only rated for up to 3-part paper and any further calls for this issue would not be covered under contract.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Yup - worked on one of those, waaayyy back.

And a 'decollator', too

An upright triangular device... shelf across the bottom where the stack of multi-part stationery sat... drag the paper up to the top of the triangle by hand and separate, one paper 'part' over a rough-coated roller, wind the carbon paper round a spindle, and the remaining 'parts' across a rough roller on the other side.... switch it on, and the rough rollers would provide enough friction to drag the paper through and the spindle would rotate to take up the carbon paper.

The trick was to adjust the speed of the thing to a maximum that allowed the job to be done without spewing finely creased paper across the room at a high rate of knots.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

We had a "burster" machine, with two rotating knives to slice the tractor-feed sides off, and a device to rip off the perforated sheets and stack them neatly.

One of the customers I occasionally visited had a burster/decollator which did the tearing off the perforation by two pinfeed tractors aligned slightly outwards, with the paper itself pinched between rubber rollers. The multiform carbon would then be wound on two spindles, the lower form stacked underneath this part of the machine, still continuous, the middle and top forms being bursted by additional sets of rollers running slightly faster than the first one, then stacked.

This allowed the rotating knives to be fitted in the corridor to the BOFH den.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

We had a "burster" machine, with two rotating knives to slice the tractor-feed sides off, and a device to rip off the perforated sheets and stack them neatly.

In the post room of a company where I had one of my first jobs (so we're talking many many years ago) they had a device to open envelopes. This was a device with a circular blade that spun round as the letters were fed past. They'd get a lot of letters that didn't have a recipient stated and these needed opening to locate the correct department/person. The machine manual stated that you were supposed to tap the letters so that the contents were clear of the top 3mm of the envelope. Then you just put the stack of letters on the tray in a vertical position with the top down and let the thing feed them through at some speed. However one day they had a work experience in the post room who was doing a week with us spending a day each with several departments. He remembered to tap the letters and had them with the correct gap at the top,

Sadly he then put them into the machine with the top up. About 100 or so letters were sliced into two at the fold. There was often a 6mm strip that might contain vital information to decoding any sentences that were sliced by the machine. After putting quite a few outgoing letters in the franking machine upside down he was told to go home for the day. HR put him somewhere the next day where he could do less damage.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

I remeber my parents bought a printer with a 4 colour ribbon which had to changed back out to the black one if you didn't want it smear yellow on everything. It also had tendency to pick up the ink colour on the pin heads so turn the colours black before you knew it (Or make anything yellow mildly red).

Also remember how the quiet mode did nothing....

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

> I think we even experimented with re-inking an old ribbon,

Ah yes, using a ribbon until it literally fell apart. Not sure what was worse, messy fingers from ribbon re-inking or a messy mind from remembering the dreaded ESC-P codes. Those were... Hang on, no, let's never go back to the printer hell of the 80s and early 90s.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Back in my penny pinching days, I recall reloading worn out film ribbon cartridges with regular cloth typewriter ribbon. The print head would gum up every six months or so, but it was easily cleaned.

Fan fold? That stuff cost money. A roll of butchers paper run through the bandsaw a few times saved more bucks for the important things like a second computer.

Re: Classical wizardry

I surely hope you made jokes about casting spells. If not, bring your 1980s self a bit closer and get hit a little.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

"I think we were all startled at the amount of tape that reader had managed to cram into itself:"

ICL card duplicators had interesting ways of cramming cards into output hoppers. User standing nonchalantly beside the duplicator that was swallowing his stack of cards but not looking at the hoppers. One of them was somehow managing to crease the cards as they went into it. The hopper was filling up with a sort of random corrugated cardboard. Fortunately it was only one hopper.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Martin, you're an ICL man? Are you aware of the various collected stories of ICL by its old-boys?

Anthology I :

http://www.bitsandbytes.shedlandz.co.uk/icl_anthology.pdf

e.g.: Hot stuff, c. 1974 Chris Horrobin

In the 2903, all the mechanics of the peripherals were controlled by programming in the central processor rather than by their own electronics. Of particular note was the pair of instructions to switch the card reader’s ‘picker’ solenoid on and off. The solenoid was rated for dissipating heat on the basis of only being ‘on’ for extremely short periods. This led to the famous software failure known as ‘select card reader and catch fire’.

Anthology II:

http://www.bitsandbytes.shedlandz.co.uk/anotherICL_anthology.pdf

source of the great Sales word Apolocolocyntosis: extravagant or absurdly uncritical glorification

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Also stories in the pension newsletters, eg:

http://www.bitsandbytes.shedlandz.co.uk/B&B36%20spring%202013v3.pdf

> Bert Morton and Jim Woodhead were members of Doc Keene's development team during the 1939 - 45 war, and to us new starters, they were characters in their own right. Bert never used an Avo to time camshafts on his machines. 110v (the general machine voltage) was his accepted safe voltage and he generally used his right hand with his two middle fingers withdrawn to his palm, and index and little fingers extended as probes, to "feel" the open and closed voltage conditions at the cam contact points. He warned his team against trying to emulate his success in this measuring technique.

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I think my favourite story was ICL trying to install a machine for an outpost of an African railway. Couldn't get an electrical Ground so couldn't fire it up. Lots of attempts, culminating in digging a vast hole with mechanical diggers, wiring together a dozen junked cars and pushing them in with the diggers, refilling the hole then soaking it thoroughly, and... still nothing.

Finally someone twigged. There's a thousand miles of railtrack passing by the building. Run a line out, quick spot of soldering, tada -- they have a ground.

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Charles Dickens's grandson has some glorious stories there -- an outstanding tech.manager, with precisely 0 tech knowledge.