I was at a mall one time and they had a big gaudy "handwriting analysis"
computer. I was bored (waiting for the wife or something) and kept
looking at it. Something seemed familiar about it.

Finally, it struck me. It was an old Frieden Flexowriter (a TeleType
made by the Singer sewing machine company) and I used to own one of
them, but something was weird looking about it. A few more minutes of
study showed that it was half covered with some sort of cardboard or
wood box. Then I realized why.

The Flexowriter was roughly an ASR33 -- it had an 8 level punch/reader.
The operator had punched out some number of fortune cookie responses and
put a "STOP TAPE" at the end of each one. You punch a bunch of idles at
the start and end, line them up and tape or glue them and you have an
endless loop.

So, the mark comes by and writes their sample. You drop it in a slot.
Lights blink (probably some cam-driven light blinker or maybe just a
bunch of bimetallic blinkers setup to not blink together). Then, with a
great flourish, you press Start Tape. Chunk chunk chunk chunk... You are
a compassionate and warm person. <STOP TAPE>

Next mark, please!

I miss that old Flexowriter. Not as elegant as the TeleType, but very
useful in its day. I wonder how much paper tape it would take to store a
CD-ROM. Let's see 680MB, say .2" per byte.. Something like 11,333 feet?
Not quite 4000 yards. Maybe 3 1/2 km. Not counting the room for splicing
:-)

Al Williams
AWC
* Easy RS-232 Prototyping
http://www.al-williams.com/awce/rs1.htm





> -----Original Message-----
> From: pic microcontroller discussion list
> [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of Bob Ammerman
> Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 10:45 AM
> To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Re: Old (ancient) message scrolling
>
>
> That was a time when paper tape was all the rage (stock
> tickers, industrial automation). Perhaps just a heavy tape in
> a continuous loop with all the pixels punched in it and a
> separate read head for each pixel column in the outside display.
>
> Bob Ammerman
> RAm Systems
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jinx" <joecolquitt@CLEAR.NET.NZ>
> To: <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
> Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 9:43 PM
> Subject: [EE]: Old (ancient) message scrolling
>
>
> > I was watching a TV program that had newsreels of
> > scrolling message boards (a la Times Square round-
> > the building) from the 1930s. How did they do that ?
> > Valves ? Motor switching ? Thousands of relays ? And
> > how about the message itself. Was it stored in a patch board or
> > something similar ?
> >
> > --
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