RE: Beehives...

[Alan Flippen <flippen@nytimes.com>]

At 11:58 AM 5/5/98 -0400, Aron Insinga wrote:

>Some of you remember the laser printer that Pete and his students built
>from a Xerox telecopier that virtually stopped time-sharing on EE's 11/70
>so that it could become a device controller whenever anybody printed
>something.  (It wasn't completed until after my time.)

Is *THAT* what it was? I had no idea it was a homebrew. By 1979 it was
working. DELTA's only access to it was batch-style; we would "print" the
jobs out to a magtape, which the UDCC operators would then take over to
whatever machine controlled the XEROX printer and run it out overnight. My
"unofficial history" records that Bob Mader wrote the first version of the
Xerox program and Rich Thomson wrote the second.

>As for ugly fonts, I think that the 11/50's 132-column Centronics dot
>matrix printer shook the butcher-block lab table when it did a carriage
>return, and the table had to be moved so that it wouldn't bang into the RP03s.

I believe that printer survived into 358, but not into Willard Hall.

Oh, one other things about the Beehives: their inch-and-a-half-thick
keyboards would be banned today as uneconomic and destructive of people's
wrists. I guess we all escaped carpal tunnel syndrome because of being young
and flexible ... ?

Cheers,
Alan