On 2016-05-26 1:43 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
On 05/26/2016 08:54 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
Speaking of ribbons, in college I occasionally used a type of ribbon
I've never seen on line printers since: a film ribbon. Think of the
"letter quality" ribbons used on professional typewriters, or daisy
wheel printers, a thin plastic film with some carbon-like coating on
one side. Now make one the width of a line printer ribbon.
Our 360/44 normally used a regular cloth ribbon, but a film ribbon
could be mounted if desired. I did so to print my honor's thesis,
using the film ribbon and the upper/lower case print train (TN
train?) to print the final text (from RUNOFF on our PDP-11 system,
which had no line printer).
Yes, that's exactly the purpose they were for. You mounted the text
train and a film ribbon, and got a fairly nice looking printout. IBM's
early manuals were all printed this way, the look was pretty iconic.
The printed output was then photographed to make offset printing
plates. (Later they used IBM composer word processing printers, and
they looked nicer, with proportional spacing.)
Jon
Not just manuals but also the ALD logic diagrams they where printed on a
1403 with a special print train.
Paul.
