[GreenKeys] Was Model 40 - GE Terminet 300

[John]

In the late 70s I found 3 GE Terminet 300 terminals on a pallet at a 
local surplus yard - I paid $100 for them and they were kind enough to 
fork them onto my truck.

Got them home, found 2 worked, and actually ordered the manuals from GE 
(another $75). I used them a long time with BBSes and the primitive 
online services of the day, plus a friend was a long-lines engineer for 
(Big Phone Company) and he showed me several phone numbers that dialed 
in to various remote reporting and maintenance sites. No 'evil' was 
done, but I had a blast watching the ebb and flow of big central offices 
as various things went wrong, broke, and were fixed remotely.

The Terminet also was a 'band' printer, and had an RS232 interface. 
Unlike the Model 40, it's band ran horizontally with the pallets 
sticking up from it vertically like fence pickets. The band ran in a 
"racetrack" configuration, with the tips of the type pallets in line 
with the platen. There were (IIRC) three entire sets of the printable 
ASCII characters, upper and lower case. Behind the type band were 72 
hammers, and in front of the pallets was the constantly-moving (slowly) 
ribbon, then the paper, then the platen. The paper was sprocket-fed, and 
the machine had an electronic Vertical Forms Unit to wrangle forms and 
formatting. The keyboard was made of weird pyramid-shaped keys with 
hall-effect sensors - these also made a bit noise when typed on.

The machines I had were fitted out with two cassette decks, that took 
the place of paper tape. Done right, you had a sort-of very limited word 
processor.

I spent many hours with that machine, hooked up to a Novation JCat at 
300 Baud, reading BBS traffic, online with The Source and Prodigy, and 
filling the back bedroom of my apartment with festoons of greenbar paper.

A link to a pdf of the brochure is here: 
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646207 also 
searching for "GE Terminet 300" will bring up many pictures.

Seeing the Mod 40 video, I'm reminded of the "rack-rack-rack-rack...." 
sound of the sequential-firing hammers (left to right) as each typebar 
came into the correct position.

Good Times!


Cheers

John KB6SCO

Carson City