michael brown wrote:
> IIRC, you could punch up a control card that defined tab stops
> wherever you wanted, auto skip zones and even numeric only areas.  As
> I remember it many of the machines would often stop one space to the
> right of the defined tab because they never got properly adjusted.
> That service was reserved for actual keypunch professionals.  ;-)

I think you are remembering keypunch machines, not teletypes.  These did
indeed have a drum you could put a special card on that defined tab stops
and other stuff.  Teletypes like the ASR-33 and ASR-35 weren't that smart.

One annoyance of the model 041(?) keypunch machine is that although it had a
duplicate card function, it wasn't actually capable of duplicating an
arbitrary binary card.  Certain bit combinations that couldn't result from
keystrokes caused the machine to jam.  You could only create those cards in
the manual "multi-punch" mode where you specified exactly which bits to
punch out.  That was also the way to clear a jam.  Put it in multi-punch
mode and bang on the keyboard like a monkey until all the punches got
released and it could continue feeding the card thru.


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