Flexowriter history

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Joe" == Joe R <rigdonj at cfl.rr.com> writes:

 Joe> Al pointed me to some information about the Flexowriter on Herb
 Joe> Johnson's website. It seems that the Flexowriters have been
 Joe> around since at least WW II and was orignally made by Commercial
 Joe> Controls. CC was bought out by Frieden sometime doing the
 Joe> 1960s. The original Flexowriter only had a PT reader and punch
 Joe> and no external I/O and was used for generating form
 Joe> letters. ...

Flexowriters have also been used in place of keypunches by
organizations that dislike punch cards.

My first programming was in Holland, at the Tech U Eindhoven, home of
the famous "THE" operating system.  (If you've never heard of it, go
read "the structure of the THE operating system" -- one of the best,
and short, papers in the history of computing.)

That was in the lage 1960s, a batch system, primarily using Algol (not
Fortran), on a Philips EL-X8 27 bit machine.  Program as well as
application data entry was primarily by paper tape.  So the "keypunch"
room was actually a room full of Flexowriters.  They had customized
keyboards for the Algol character set, and handy features such as
"stop tape duplicate on ';' character" so you could edit source tapes
efficiently. 

After working with Flexowriters, exposure to the ASR33 came as a nasty
shock -- those are shoddy clunkers compared to the rock solid
workmanship of the Flexowriter.

	    paul