Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Top-level
Ken Shirriff

The teleprinter was mounted in a storage locker in the Shuttle middeck, one level below the flight deck. 9/12

12 comments
Ken Shirriff

We managed to get the printer operational. This wasn't easy because the rubber rollers had turned to liquid, gumming up the mechanism. CuriousMarc carefully disassembled the printer, cleaned all the parts, and realigned the hammers. 10/12

youtube.com/watch?v=EDeL15amsu

Ken Shirriff replied to Ken

Credits: printer restoration done with CuriousMarc, @tubetime, and Mike Stewart. Printer provided by Marcel. Shuttle photos from catalog.archives.gov. Locker photo from DMolybdenum, drawing from the military teleprinter manual.
12/12

Peter replied to Ken

@kenshirriff @tubetime that is incredibly cool. It’s a shame the YouTube video wasn’t longer showing the reverse engineering effort undertaken. I love all your work as it’s quite extraordinary what was built so quickly with such engineering skills.

Ken Shirriff replied to Peter

@plambrechtsen @tubetime CuriousMarc will make a video on the restoration at some point.

Peter replied to Ken

@kenshirriff @tubetime your AGC rebuild series is still one of my favourite on YouTube.

chico replied to Ken

@kenshirriff
This is amazing. I think I now know where some espionage movie title sequences with typed characters showing up out of order come from: a teleprinter.

Valtteri Koskivuori replied to Ken

@kenshirriff @tubetime Wonderful restoration! Tangentially related, I read that the optional copier for the DEC VT52 used electrolysis to print onto damp paper using a helical electrode on a spinning drum. I found drawings and docs, but as far as I can tell, there are no working units that have been demonstrated on video anywhere. Would be really cool to see that in action! Very few terminals seem to have ’add water’ as a regular maintenance item 😄

Richie Rich

@kenshirriff CuriousMarc is such a cool guy. What a freak. 😎🤖

Ken Shirriff

@glowl What could go wrong with bees on a Space Shuttle? Appropriately, the experiment was sponsored by HONEYwell.

Photo from airandspace.si.edu/collection-

Mer-fOKxTOwl replied to Ken

@kenshirriff i remembered there being something real about that, i assume the "bees" in the picture i initially answered to is an acronym for something else?

Go Up