[GreenKeys] Terminet 8000 - magnetic printing

[Robert Nickels]

On 6/14/2020 6:37 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> it filled the whole room with paper in no time at all. 

The first programming class I took in the early 70s, we keypunched our 
Fortran programs on 029s and handed them over to be batched at night and 
would get the printout the next day.   Which came from an IBM 1401 page 
printer which was a beast - a chain printer.   I had to look it up but 
wikipedia says  "The original model could print 600 lines of text per 
minute and could skip blank lines at up to 75 inches per second".   Some 
grad assistants who where hanging around showed some of us how it could 
shoot out paper in a blur if you gave it blank line or form feed or 
whatever it was, and hinted that it would be really cool to write a loop 
that would make it do that until it ran out of paper.   These guys were 
never nice to noobs so I smelled a set-up, but there's always that one 
kid who just has to try it.

What they didn't tell us is that until you had established some 
credibility, all your decks would first be run thru a program to scan 
for exactly this kind of shenanigans, and offenders would have their 
computer privileges suspended until they had a "chat" with the 
department head.    As the grad assistants laughingly bragged after he 
got caught, "Hey, we're Computer Scientists, man, do you think we'd be 
that dumb?"

Video of a 1403 here, also from the computer history  museum: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnlRZxHeTFU

And I found this video from the same place, with a little "printer art" 
thrown in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5e_70711E

73, Bob W9RAN