10 Nov
2020
10 Nov
'20
9:10 p.m.
Speaking of the Selectric
Another old story about printers. Back in 1974 (ish) I was an undergrad at MIT working at
the Architecture Machine Group, which was the predecessor to the Media Lab. We had a
home-grown OS for the Interdata 16-bit minicomputers, whose instruction sets were very
much like 16-bit IBM 360’s.
There was an IBM 2741 there for talking to the institute mainframes, and somehow I got the
job of writing a device driver for it. It was quite an adventure getting the tilt-rotate
codes and so forth to fit in the 160 hex bytes available… I recall having to chain short
branches together if the condition codes were right.
The success of that made me a go-to guy for printing, unfortunately, so later it was my
job to patch the line printer to print capital O after the 0 wore out*.
* A real thing, way before Dilbert got hold of it.