Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
too bad it took me this long to discover this page, but in my youth, as a teenager, i operated a 1401 at our family data center operation. We had the code to play music on the radio, but my favorite as playing music on the 1403N-1 line printer. And yes, once in a rage of a botch 5 hour print report , i did slam the print head closed and the print chain went flying across the floor. Not mentioned was the paper feed you could program. if you added page skips in time, you could get the effect of drums playing with the music. We had an open house party at the office and i ran some songs on the printer and people would be staring up at the ceiling wondering if they were really hearing music coming from those computers. Also back in the day, computer data centers were noisy, OSHA would have required hearing protection. Everyone would talk loud because of hearing loss. Thank you for the fun article and reliving some great memories for me. Walter Taucher
Jan 18, 2024, 10:18:30 PM
Posted to Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe