🚀 go-pugleaf

anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) writes:

>In article I (Jim Clarke) wrote:
>>I just looked at some Flexowriter output I happen to have lying around,

>	I just looked at some *Flexowriters* we happen to have lying around,

Good heavens!  I've been one-upped!

>   ... I used ours for my word-processing until UNIX arrived....

Yes; I recall a post-doc from New Zealand (I was at Sydney Uni. in
Australia) printing out his entire thesis, which was on Flexowriter
paper tape.  He agreed that this was not entirely without drawbacks,
but I agreed that it was a pretty nifty idea anyway.

>I'm sure that if I put a plug on one now, and switched it on, it would still
>work perfectly, and the old, familiar, dat-dat-dat-... sound would echo
>across the room.

That familiar sound is my explanation for why my hearing is rather poor
around 1 kHz.  Sydney's Flexowriters were in small cubicles in a basically
concrete room, and the hammers on the paper tape were pretty loud.
Keypunches were in some ways noisier, but I'm not sure they managed the
same broad spectrum.

When I remember this, my nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
-
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
              (416) 978-4058
clarke@csri.toronto.edu     or    clarke@csri.utoronto.ca
   or ...!{uunet, pyramid, watmath, ubc-cs}!utai!utcsri!clarke