[COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature)

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Fair enough, sorry to be confusing.  It is interesting that a piece of IBM
early 60s mechanical design (the electric), lasted as long as it did.  I
don't know if there was a Selectric IV, there certainly was a Selectric III
that was sold through the 70s and early 1980s.  Wang created what they
called word processing and only then did the Selectrics and Daisy Wheels
start to slowly diminish[1].   By the 80s, when we created Stellar
Computers, all of the admin's had a PC/AT and a copy of Wordperfect and
used our LaserWriters in Engineering, but we still had one Selectric for
times when a typewriter was easier.

Clem

1] A fun side story.  One of many sisters is/was a professional concert
harpist (she has incredible manual dexterity).   Tough to feed yourself as
a concert harpist, so she got a job at MIT working as Ron's admin.   Her
terminal was an ITS connection and so they taught her to edit documents
using EMACS/Tex (she actually typed the RSA papers for Ron so many years
ago using the same).   At one point, she was thinking of leaving MIT, and
when she would interview different firms, they usually would ask her if she
knew 'Wang.'   It's interesting that her MIT skills were the ones that
lasted.  For the last few years, she has worked as a technical editor/book
index creator *etc*.. for a number of research orgs and technical book
publishers -- she can handle EMACS and LaTex of course, not just MS-Word ;-)

On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 7:10 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Monday,  9 November 2020 at  9:26:05 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 11:36 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the
> /360
> >> itself.
> >>
> > Hmmm, I think what I said is correct. The S/360 system was released in
> > 1964. My friend Russ Roebling (360/50 chief designer ) once told me the
> > console came from the office products (typewriter) division.  I wish I
> > could remember the story he told me, but IIRC it was something WRT to
> > politics inside of IBM and ensuring the console device and the 360's
> launch
> > between the divisions.  [Just like every large firm I have worked, I'm
> not
> > really surprised to hear that divisional fiefdoms were rampant at IBM in
> > those days, too].
> >
> > I'm fairly sure that the Selectric (I) was early1960s (I think 61/62).
>  I
> > just don't remember the model number of the S/360's console (every device
> > at IBM had numeric names), your memory is likely that the number was 7xy.
> >  But as I said, I'm fair sure that the guts of the console were based on
> > the Selectric's design.
>
> Thanks for the interesting details.  Yes, that all matches my
> recollection.  Originally you were talking about mid- to late 1970s,
> and that's what my "much earlier" referred to.
>
> Greg
> --
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