21 Dec
2023
21 Dec
'23
9:53 a.m.
On Dec 19, 2023, at 4:31 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, the 1403 was very loud. The pitch of the noise varied with the
sequence of characters being printed. Some IBM hacker (yes, they
existed) came up with a deck of cards that, when printed, played
"Anchors Aweigh" on the 1403. IBM field service wasn't very keen on
this hack because it put a lot of wear-and-tear on the print train.
The holidays always seemed to feature people running programs which played festive songs
by punching fully laced cards or printing patterns on the line printers. Whenever I
noticed something, I'd ask the operators to kill those programs because they could
cause equipment failures. A fully laced punch card is much more flexible and likely to
jam. Printing all columns on a printer, especially doing so without a line feed, tends to
moisten the paper which tended to gum up the print trains.
Those line printers were definitely noisy. I've got tinnitus thanks to working
around them.
- Rod