IBM System 370 1970

[Homer J Simpson]

[Tomorokoshi]

It's very important that disk packs are made in a dust-free room! Therefore, let's take a tour of it!

100 MB per disk pack does sound impressive though.

[Miyuki]

My father worked with eastern clone of 370 and have some relics at home, like this nice big disk plate and tape reel and of course interesting stories how they trying to keep it working as quality was terrible and every part was from other eastern block country and only some reliable parts was genuine IBM 

[Brumby]

There's a sound consigned to history @4:17. I'd forgotten the sound of the flick of a finger against the perforations of the fan-fold stationary.

Oh, yes.

I'd like a dollar for every time I've done that.

[rrinker]

 It's been a long time since I've heard the continuous buzz of a line printer, too. Last one I saw was part of our PC network, used to print customer bills mainly. Forget what kind it was after all these years, not an IBM, but when it was running full tilt a carton of paper just disappeared into it.

[Cerebus]

It's been a long time since I've heard the continuous buzz of a line printer, too. Last one I saw was part of our PC network, used to print customer bills mainly. Forget what kind it was after all these years, not an IBM, but when it was running full tilt a carton of paper just disappeared into it.

Ahh, fond memories. I have heard machine guns that were almost literally quieter than some of the line printers I've worked with.

I once had a beer and a chat with one of the team who developed IBM's first laser line-printer replacement. This beast laser printed fan fold. The motivation for making the machine was that even the fastest line printer wasn't fast enough for people like the banks who were just churning out printed paper like there was no tomorrow. So the goal was raw speed. This fellow told me that one of their principal problems wasn't getting the paper to move fast enough, or printing it fast enough, it was stopping it catching fire while it was moving so fast. It printed at up to 20,040 lines per minute. Yes you read that right, over 20 thousand lines per minute. For standard 66 line fanfold that's about 200 ms per page, five pages a second, or 3 1/4 minutes to eat and spit out a standard 1000 sheet box of the stuff.

[Brumby]

Ah yes ... the IBM 3800 printing subsystem.  The first time I saw one of those in operation, it was dumfounding.

Z-fold blank stationery went through this thing like crazy.  I saw paper going through flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick -pause- flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick-flick .... Each flick was a page - and 5 pages per second is about right.

The paper just poured out.

[Cerebus]

The paper just poured out.

Posting about it prompted me to go and try to find something more. I tripped onto a page that, among scant facts, had one fascinating gem. The overall continuous part of the paper motion was at 38 inches per seconds but the actual printing process was a sort of snapping on and off the drum of the page to be printed (while, remember, the page was still attached to the ones either side of it). The individual pages had to be accelerated to match the drum's continuous motion and they had just 22 ms to accelerate the page and register it to the drum to within 2 thou.