oh no, it was literally a typewriter, old school, no selectric ball. https://youtu.be/4HfaveA_NE0?t=365 On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 3:06 PM Rich Salz wrote: > It was basically a selectric on top of a box with little hooks. It pulled > each key right? > > On Mon, May 8, 2023, 2:47 PM Clem Cole wrote: > >> Indeed -- and the sounds it made were distinct. Different from ASRxx or >> 2741's >> >> For the younger crew, this made the light and >>so much quieter<< TI >> Silent 700 of 10 years later such a marvel: >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700 >> ᐧ >> >> On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 12:12 PM ron minnich wrote: >> >>> ah, the flexowriter, for those who never saw it, was literally a >>> typewriter with solenoids at the bottom. I owned one, it was a miracle to >>> behold. >>> >>> >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter#/media/File:Flexowriter_2201_Programatic.jpg >>> >>> On Mon, May 8, 2023 at 7:19 AM Douglas McIlroy < >>> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote: >>> >>>> Although it dates from four years ago, MIT's obituary for Corbató was >>>> still interesting to reread. It couldn't bring itself to mention >>>> Unix--only the latecomer Linux. It also peddled some mythology about >>>> Whirlwind from the decade before timesharing. >>>> >>>> "Whirlwind was ... a rather clunky machine. Researchers often had >>>> trouble getting much work done on it, since they had to take turns >>>> using it for half-hour chunks of time. (Corbató said that it had a >>>> habit of crashing every 20 minutes or so.)" >>>> >>>> "Clunky" perhaps refers to Whirlwind's physical size. It occupied two >>>> stories of the Barta Building, not counting the rotating AC/DC >>>> motor-generators in the basement. But it was not ponderous; its clean >>>> architecture prefigured "RISC" by two decades. >>>> >>>> Only a few favored people got "chunks" of (night) time on Whirlwind >>>> for interactive use. In normal business hours it was run by dedicated >>>> operators, who fed it user-submitted code on punched paper tape. >>>> Turnaround time was often as short as an hour--including the >>>> development of microfilm, the main output medium. Hardware crashes >>>> were rare--much rarer than experience with vacuum-tube radios would >>>> lead one to expect--thanks to "marginal testing", in which voltages >>>> were ramped up and down once a day to smoke out failing tubes before >>>> they could affect real computing. My recollection is that crashes >>>> happened on a time scale of days, not minutes. >>>> >>>> "Clunky" would better describe the interface of the IBM 704, which >>>> displaced Whirlwind in about 1956. How backward the 60-year-old >>>> uppercase-only Hollerith card technology seemed, after the humane full >>>> Flexowriter font we had enjoyed on Whirlwind. But the 704 had the >>>> enormous advantages of native floating-point (almost all computing was >>>> floating-point in those days) and FORTRAN. (Damn those capital >>>> letters!) >>>> >>>> Doug >>>> >>>