Re: NCR
"I wonder if anyone remembers decollators and bursters."
My first job was a junior operator in a computer bureau running customer jobs. One customer supplied their own multi-part paper that had four layers plus three carbons sandwiched in between. It was extremely flimsy and we had to be very, very careful setting the print impact pressure.
The job didn't spool the printing - so an unrecoverable print error meant a rerun. The printing impact at high speed could cause some of the perforations at the top of the page to burst - and the paper would jump off the tractors on one side. The result was a pile-up of several pages of crumpled paper and carbons - fragments of which then had to be carefully cleaned from the platen.
It gave rise to a saying: "Someone had a nice salesman's lunch out of buying that paper".
IT was quite physical in those days:
magnetic tapes spinning across the room because their hub hadn't been locked;
magnetic tape stretched to a filament due to a balancing servo malfunction;
accidentally cleaning (disintegrating) tape heads with the acetone rather than the isopropyl alcohol from identical large brown bottles;
painful finger fine cuts from paper tape;
trying to rewind a large paper tape that had been lazily despooled by letting it fall off its core;
80 column cards concertinaed by a misfeed jam;
cards flying through the air because the receiving hopper weight was not in place.
Binary bootstrap cards were like lace - mostly holes held together by a fine lattice of cardboard. Every so often the working copy was shredded by the reader. Then it was not unusual to find some lazy sod had committed the cardinal sin of using all the supposedly inviolate submaster/master ones - rather than producing copies. Then you had to iron flat the shredded one and manually copy the intricate pattern with a hand punch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
