There was even a day not too way back when printers seemed to be going the best way of the dodo; bear in mind the “paperless workplace” craze? However then, printer producers invented printers so low-cost they may give them away whereas charging $12,000 a gallon for the ink, and the paperless workplace immediately suffered an extinction-level occasion of its personal. You’d assume house can be the one place the place pc customers can be spared the travails of printing, however as [Ken Shirriff] outlines, there have been printers aboard the Area Shuttle, and the story behind them is fascinating.
The push for printers in house got here from the mixed forces of NASA’s love for checklists and the necessity for astronauts within the early packages to tediously copy them to paper; Apollo 13, anybody? In accordance with [Ken], NASA had all the time deliberate for the flexibility to print on the Shuttle, however when their fancy fax machine wasn’t prepared in time, they kludged collectively an interim resolution from a US navy teleprinter, the AN/UG-74C. [Ken] received a maintain of one in every of these beasts for a glance inside, and it holds some wonders. Based mostly on a Motorola MC6800, the teleprinter sported each a keyboard, a present loop digital interface, and even a rudimentary phrase processor, none of which have been of a lot use aboard the Shuttle. All that stuff was stripped out, leaving principally simply the spinning 80-character-wide print drum and the array of 80 solenoid-powered hammers, to bang out full traces of textual content at a time. To make the printer Shuttle-worthy, a 600-baud frequency-shift keying (FSK) interface was added, which patched into the spaceplane’s comms system.
[Ken] does his typical meticulous evaluation of the engineering of this excellent little bit of retro house gear, which you’ll be able to learn all about within the linked article. We hope this portends a video by his merry band of Apollo-centric collaborators, for a have a look at some scrumptious Nineteen Seventies house {hardware}.