
Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe - sohkamyung
http://www.righto.com/2017/12/creating-christmas-card-on-vintage-ibm_7.html
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abraae
Deja vu! I spent years fixing mainframes at IBM and the 1403 lived on for
years after the 1401, attached to more modern systems like System/360.

It was quite a beast to maintain. The main part is a "train" of metal slugs
with the letters, digits and a few symbols that hurtle around on a steel oiled
track.

To print a letter H, the machine fires an electromagnet that drives a hammer
onto the next H as it flies past.

One of the maintenance activities was adjusting the hammer strike, which you
did by printing a page full of H's, and moving the strike forwards and
backwards so that the left and right uprights of the "H" were both printed
clearly.

The worst scenario with this machine was a "train crash", when one of the
slugs dug into the train and all of the flying metal slugs smashed into each
other in a giant screaming hail of destruction.

Other activities: \- topping up the hydraulic fluid \- replacing dead hammer
drivers

~~~
netsharc
Hah, I never thought I would ever hear a story about a computer that needs its
hydraulic fluids topped-up.

My first modem is 28.8k, I guess you can call me young'un...

~~~
abraae
Young'un indeed!

IBM used to use hydraulics pretty extensively. Their 2311 disk drives used
hydraulic actuators to move the heads in and out over the platters. Hot
pressurized oil and spinning magnetic media - a combination not made in
heaven. I seem to remember stories about injuries caused by hydraulic oil
piercing engineer body parts.

Thankfully they were phasing out as I started. Though living in the colonies,
we used to see machines still working that were probably nowhere to be found
in the US any more.

~~~
King-Aaron
> I seem to remember stories about injuries caused by hydraulic oil piercing
> engineer body parts.

Hydraulic fluid injection injuries are appalling, and can often require
amputation. I recall assisting a guy who had split a main line on a bobcat,
and had oil spray into his hand. He lost most of his fingers.

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wpietri
Wow, what a memory rush. I used to color on fanfold line printer paper like
this. When I was in kindergarten I'd sometimes go with my dad to work on a
weekend when he needed to debug a job. I think those are the exact printer and
keypunch models.

I would happily play on the punchcard machines for ages. When you turned one
on (with the flip of a heavy switch) they'd start humming, giving a sense of
coiled power. I loved the crisp thud of each punch, and the fluffy mass of
little squares in the bin that collected waste. Compared with modern computing
technology, they have a very industrial feel. I remember being delighted that
my last name was all on the top row of the keyboard.

I also remember being absolutely fascinated by insert mode on the terminals. I
could make shapes with the symbols and then make them move forward by arrowing
back and holding down the spacebar. The slowly fading green glow of the
phosphors was magical to me, as was the way each letter was composed of
visible dots.

There was a haecceity, a thisness to early tech like this that I miss a little
in comparison with the incredibly flexible devices of today. I wouldn't go
back, of course, but I definitely get why people spent time maintaining and
restoring relics like this.

~~~
LeoPanthera
> The slowly fading green glow of the phosphors was magical to me, as was the
> way each letter was composed of visible dots.

If you have nostalgia for phosphor, but don't want a huge, hot, CRT in your
office, and you have Mac, check out the terminal emulator "Cathode":
[http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

(No association. I just like the product.) It's extremely configurable, you
can simulate a wide variety of tubes in various states of (dis)repair.

Probably the perfect way to play nethack.

~~~
Something1234
There's another one called "cool retro term" that will run on more operating
systems.

[https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-
term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term)

~~~
cr0sh
Couple with this font for a true retro feel:

[http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/](http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/)

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cpr
I _loved_ those 1403 printers as a high school kid working on the IBM 360/65
at the Naval Electronics Lab on Point Loma (San Diego area).

Not sure why/how they hired me for the summer to do systems hacking (lost in
the mists of time), but I remember adding some feature or other to the WATFOR
Fortran compiler. (Maybe some additional COMMON features?)

There was something ultimately satisfying about the fonts used and the way a
finely-tuned 1403 would render characters (even lower case on special
models!).

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GJR
To complement this: Johann Johansson - IBM 1401 - A User's Manual -
[https://open.spotify.com/album/3ZqqvWwHzoVCxwdsaUaF9z](https://open.spotify.com/album/3ZqqvWwHzoVCxwdsaUaF9z)

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rezwrrd
This is brilliant! We have one of these rusting in the basement at work, this
gives me ideas. It would sure beat the dot-matrix printer I've been using to
annoy my colleagues, but would definitely be harder to connect to wifi.

