Re: [IBM1130] How common was use of lower case alphabetic characters on console printer?

[Peter Vaughan]

I can't answer your question directly but can offer an observation. The typeball on our 1130 was black with ink on the upper case side of the ball with very little ink on the lower case side. It does not mean it never printed on the "lower case" side but it does look like the majority of printing was on the upper case side.

I have however found a reference to the 952 type ball... it was used on the IBM 1620 console, also a Selectric 1 like the 1130 - see http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1583.99G

- Peter


On Tue 17/09/13 15:01 , Carl Claunch <carl.c...@gartner.com> wrote:

The 1130 typeball places capital versions of the alphabet on both sides, displaying the large letter regardless of case. I found an almost perfect typeball, the only deviation from the 1130 is that it produces lower case un-capitalized letters. An ebay auction for a type ball listed it only as type 952, no font name, with the picture appearing to match the BCD layout of the 1130 ball. I found it has all the 1130 characters in exactly the right places to match the tilt/rotate codes that are issued with the XIO, which is very handy for my 1130 replica with its leveraged Memory Typewriter mechanism as a console. 

Any idea how common or uncommon it was to issue the lower case version of letters? The judicious use of both cases can avoid having to shift the typewriter between UC and LC, saving the 60-70 milliseconds per shift, but the keyboard produces hollerith code, only upper case letters. Keypunches generated only upper case versions unless explicitly multipunched with the EBCDIC for lc versions. It would seem that most users would create the strings for typewriter output using methods that produced only upper case. On the other hand, it isn't that hard to add DC directives with the lower case codes.

 Any idea how much lower case alpha might have been embedded in DMS2, utilities, library routines, etc? Just curious for now. 

Carl

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[Dave DiVincenzo (IFS)]

As I recall, I believe lower case was used (maybe required) for the APL compiler/coding, etc.

Dave

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[Jeff Jonas]

> As I recall, I believe lower case was used (maybe required)
> for the APL compiler/coding, etc.

Argh! I can't reach my orange APL\1130 manual fast enough,
but APL was its own strange & wonderful environment,
requiring its own "golfball" typing element for all the symbols.
I don't know if it was upper or lower case
but I suspect it had only one copy of the alphabet
to allow for all the APL specific symbols (& greek alphabet?)

I suspect the answer is that the monitor & libraries
didn't care (except for the messages they generated themselves).
It was up to the application to handle such details.
Unless someone had a word processor, it was simply most portable
to use all caps/upper-case for the output to go to any printer
Despite the lack of Unix-like device agnostic redirection
due to each device's unique character set,
at least the strings, text & formats could be re-used.

As to the original poster, did the 1130's console printer controller
have different one-shot timers for each control required,
or did it generate operation-complete the same time later
regardless of the character printed?

Were film ribbons available for the 1130 console typewriter
or was it only cloth ribbons? I don't recall if I had
any of the red/black ribbons, despite it being supported.
Film ribbons kept the typing element perfectly clean
but also ment unspooling the ribbon let detective Colombo
read everything that was ever printed on that Selectric typewriter!

-- jeffj

[Carl Claunch]

Hi Peter

Thank you for the data point from the typeball, and for the research on my typeball. 

I am optimistic, given all the feedback, that output of lower case alphabetic characters will be quite uncommon. 

Carl

[Carl Claunch]

Hi Jeff

The 1130 adapter fired off two 25 ms single shots but completion of each request was gated by two signals from the typewriter. CB response is a signal that opened when the shaft that drove a print cycle (also used to start carrier movement functions) was rotating, then closed after it was sufficiently through a rotation to make it safe to send the next command to the printer. The interlock signal would close while the typewriter was involved in a long duration movement - carrier return, index (line feed) or tab - which kept the adapter from signaling that the typewriter was ready for its next request. 

The timing was not purely determined by a timer, it used those two feedback signals which were driven by the real state of the mechanism. 

Carl

[Carl Claunch]

Hi Jeff

The operators manual only describes use of fabric ribbons and that is what I remember on the machine I used in my youth - bicolor ribbon.

Carl

On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 9:52:23 AM UTC-7, Jeff Jonas wrote:

[mwright]

The APL typeball replaced the lowercase Latin letters with lower-case Greek letters and symbols, keeping the Latin uppercase letters.  The majority of an typical APL line of code used those interspersed with upper-case variable/function names.  So, when typing-in, editing, or listing APL source on a 1130 (IIRC) there would be a lot of "lower case" being printed.

My work experience was mostly with manufacturing/control usages of the 1130/1800 at IBM and its mainframe sub-assembly vendors in the Hudson Valley, NY, where the Selectric console would seldom print, and when it did, it was terse, usually upper-case only status or error messages.  Those machines that needed to print anything in volume had 1132 or 1403 line printers attached.

At one point I created an electronic interface to use with a newer Selectric terminal (IBM 2741 or similar cast off from a System 3 model 12) to attach to a Radio Shack TRS-80 so that I could print out APL source code (I burned a new character-generating prom for the TRS-80 so that I could see APL on the screen, too).  I had to write a software driver in assembler to convert from ASCII to the internal Selectric codes for tilt/rotate, and to handle the many APL characters that required overstriking.  My 2741 wasn't good at backspacing, so I ended up buffering each line and printing in two passes using a carriage return without linefeed before the second pass where the driver would print spaces and overstrikes as needed.  That was fun.

Regards,

Mike

---

Former 1130/1800/5100/System 3 Customer Engineer (and former APL programmer)

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On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 9:52:23 AM UTC-7, Jeff Jonas wrote:

[Eddy Quicksall]

Some of the guys in our office used lower case consistently while editing but I never got used to it.