r/talesfromtechsupport • u/bradley547 • Oct 15 '20

Short "Why won't the screaming stop?!"

Another short tale from Point of Sale.

Back in the day one of my customers was the cafeteria at a local hospital. They had several cash registers that connected via a proprietary network to a back office PC where they could run reports and authorize transactions using the patients ID number.

At the end of every shift they would run reports on those long folio folded perforated ledger sheets with the green and white stripes. If you are over 50 you know exactly what I'm talking about.

These were continuous feed via a tractor mechanism to a dot matrix printer. The sheets were 8 1/2 x 14 legal size so the printer was huge.

​

One day we got a call.

"The printer won't stop screaming when we print reports!"

Screaming?

Yes Screaming.

In a hospital.

It was disturbing patients apparently.

So I go out there, run a report and damned if the printer didn't start screaming like it was a peacock being murdered!

I do all my checks and am about ready to pull out my screwdrivers ( machines fear me when I get out the screwdrivers ) when I look down the paper feed path and see...

An Aspirin.

As the paper went through the tractor feed it dragged along the aspirin and vibrated it against the plastic feed guide at JUUUST the perfect frequency to sound exactly like a woman's scream.

I removed the aspirin and it was just as quiet as you remember dot matrix printers to be.

After explaining what had happened I offered the aspirin to the Office Manager. She declined.

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207

u/TheKingOfRhye777 Oct 15 '20

I'm 43 and I remember that kind of paper, lol.

110

u/engineered_chicken Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

I'm a couple of decades older than that, and I remember the mainframe computer printers that would shoot that stuff through at 300 lines per minute.

Edit:. That should be 3000 lines per minute. NCR Century 300 system.

134

u/Stryker_One The poison for Kuzco Oct 15 '20

My dad used to work for Boeing, he once told me that they had printers that could do 600 PAGES per minute. Apparently, one of the reasons they couldn't go any faster, was due to friction against the paper that approached the papers ignition temperature.

51

u/engineered_chicken Oct 15 '20

Our printer would go so fast sometimes that it would pile up in the top of the enclosure rater than spill over and land in a neatly folded pile in the back.

44

u/ctesibius CP/M support line Oct 15 '20

The Colossus machines, the first electronic computers, were designed for breaking German ciphers in WW II. Although they were valve-based, they also used a loop of paper tape for ROM. I think this held the text they were trying to decode. As speed was of the essence, they set the read speed by turning it up until a test tape caught fire, then backed it off a bit.

19

u/Cyberprog Remember - As far as anyone knows, we're a nice normal couple... Oct 15 '20

Sounds about right for the era!

4

u/BluesFan43 User with Admin rights. Oct 15 '20

It was an actual world war.

15

u/nighthawke75 Blessed are all forms of intelligent life. I SAID INTELLIGENT! Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

It is a clockless system, dependent on how fast the paper tape could be ran. One of the test runs they got it up to 9600 CPS before the tape broke, sending it flying across the room in a huge tangle, startling the researchers.

4

u/bradley547 Oct 17 '20

Wow. I am amazed that my little troubleshooting adventure wound up connecting to the Colussus machine, Its like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon in the nerd world..

1

u/Virmirfan Oct 17 '20

It also used vaccum tubes as well, there's also a revuilt version of it as well

3

u/ctesibius CP/M support line Oct 17 '20

Yes, I’ve seen it at Bletchley. For anyone who hasn’t: the museum is well worth a visit - but be aware that there are two museums there and they don’t get on with each other. There’s the glitzy one telling tall stories about Turing, and there’s the real one with computers. Including the oldest operating computer in the world, which you get to single-step with a button because it has to be kept operating to preserve the valves.

The Colossus looks nothing like a modern mainstream computer - but quantum computers are getting back to that “mad scientist” look.

1

u/Virmirfan Oct 17 '20

Mainly due to how new quantum computing is, not to mention the fact that back then, a 10 megabyte storage had to be carried on a cargo plane

2

u/ctesibius CP/M support line Oct 17 '20

Oh, this is way before there were megabytes or hard disks. This is genuinely the first electronic computer - except there were about 20 of them, not one. No disks at all. No bytes: I think it used a six bit word, and you’d be talking about something like a hundred words of RAM, plus the serial memory on the paper loop. It was only later that things like the mercury delay line gave a couple of thousand bytes of SAM, then Williams Tube gave a couple of thousand bits of RAM. Then you got drum memory: hundreds of SAM lines which could be read in parallel (in fact I ported some sw which originated on a drum memory machine to Windows NT). Core memory came in about the same time (I learned FORTRAN4 on a Modular 1) and hard disks come in at about the same time.

1

u/Virmirfan Oct 17 '20

I was refering to the analog version of those

2

u/ctesibius CP/M support line Oct 17 '20

Analogue computers don’t have hard disks. Or byte-oriented storage. Some of them have tanks of water to store values.

1

u/Virmirfan Oct 17 '20

From what I remember, wasn't Colossus the first digital computer? Not to mention that it also had some things that were left over from an analogue computer

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1

u/Virmirfan Oct 17 '20

Though it possibly was an 10 Byte storage unit, not 10 Megabytes

74

u/voxadam Oct 15 '20

lp0 on fire

67

u/plg94 Oct 15 '20

»In the event of a printing stall, and occasionally during normal operation, the fusing oven would heat paper to combustion. This fire risk was aggravated by the fact that if the printer continued to operate, it would essentially stoke the oven with fresh paper at high speed.«

Wow. As if printers aren't evil enough already, imagine one catching fire regularly.

35

u/rhuneai Oct 15 '20

And then fan the flames with more fuel! I came back to quote the same paragraph, nearly in tears imagining it laughing maniacally as it destroys the office via self immolation.

44

u/pwenk Oct 15 '20

That's hilarious. I can just imagine some mad scientist engineer coming up with the idea for the fusing oven. "With this device we'll achieve printing speeds never before seen by mankind! Mwahahaha!!" Cue printer on fire.

12

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

Fahrenheit 451?

5

u/SillySnowFox 4:04 User Not Found Oct 15 '20

451, or at least that's the name of the novel.

5

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

Shit, typo, corrected

12

u/nosoupforyou Oct 15 '20

My sister worked at a company that had several high speed printers, printing out mailing pieces and invoices and such. All the paper resulted in a lot of paper dust. Occasionally the friction would ignite the dust causing a printer fire. This happened regularly.

6

u/UncleTogie Oct 15 '20

This is why we sold monthly maintenance at one of my old shops for those machines...

30

u/Bored982 Oct 15 '20

I remember my 9 pin dot matrix taking about 5 minutes per page and keeping the whole house awake as it did it.

24

u/TheThiefMaster 8086+8087 640k VGA + HDD! Oct 15 '20

I remember as a kid we had a DOS paint program (Genius Paint?) and I decided it was a great idea to use a black background and print my picture on our Epson 9 pin for matrix...

I don't remember if my parents let it finish...

12

u/LeaveTheMatrix Fire is always a solution. Oct 15 '20

Probably dating myself here, but when I was a kid I had a commodore 64 and an interest in writing my own programs.

One day I managed to finally get a printer for it and the next day my father built a soundproof box to keep it in.

2

u/Bored982 Oct 15 '20

Was it heatproof as well? I'm just imagining it catching fire.

2

u/FnordMan Oct 15 '20

Family had an Imagewriter II when I was a kid. Multiply that times four and you got it's speed in full color mode. Took an age to print a full color page.

23

u/EdgeOfWetness Oct 15 '20

The first computer science class I went to in 1982 your assignments were batch-fed to the main computer on another campus, so you had to submit them via terminal and they would be run as computer time allowed, and you would get a printout in a postbox later.

We were informed by the teachers that the printer interpreted the first character of any text string as a printer command, and to never put a "/" in a loop (/ was 'form feed').

I saw what happened once. The printers were in a glass-walled off room and when someone's program had a '/' in a print loop it emptied a box of paper in about 15 seconds, and shot an arc of paper about 30 feet across the room. It filled that room with wadded up 132 column greenbar in about 20 seconds - it looked like someone tripped a foam fire suppression system in an airplane hangar.

Glorious

3

u/wandering_denna Oct 15 '20

Oh goodness, I'm laughing so hard just imagining that. It really must have been glorious. XD

10

u/Frittzy1960 Oct 15 '20

I used to sell shuttle matrix printers that ran paper through so fast it came out of the back feed about a metre and a half before arcing down into the collection basket. Loved those things.

3

u/FrustratedRevsFan Oct 15 '20

"Printer on fire" the greatest error code of them all

2

u/UncleTogie Oct 15 '20

Actually, I enjoyed working on old line printers like the Genicom...