Yeah that was old technology that still blows me away

Post #438,685 by crazy 3/14/21 12:51:51 PM 3/14/21 12:51:51 PM Reply	Yeah that was old technology that still blows me away No inkjet head. No spray of any sort. No laser. Incredibly fast mechanical things spinning around and having perfect timing. Seriously, band printers are mind-boggling in their mechanical technical perfection. This is practically steampunk. I would like to see the micro code that ran on those hammers and determined when to slam. It had to have some type of start on the band that sent a signal and then there had to be lookup tables and assumptions because there was nothing that was telling those hammer banks what was where, they had to figure it out themselves.
Post #438,688 by Another Scott 3/14/21 1:44:13 PM 3/14/21 1:44:13 PM Reply	Speaking of old mechanical tech... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/scientists-solve-another-piece-of-the-puzzling-antikythera-mechanism/ ~ 125 BC Modern people still haven't figured out all the details of how it worked (like did it have a part made of concentric cylinders, and if so, how were they made before the lathe was invented?). Clever beasties. Cheers, Scott.
Post #438,692 by boxley 3/14/21 10:29:53 PM 3/14/21 10:29:53 PM Reply	The lathe is an ancient tool, dating at least to ancient Egypt and known and used in Assyria https://ravimachines.com/history-of-lathe-machine/ greece as well "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #438,693 by static 3/15/21 12:11:40 AM 3/15/21 12:11:40 AM Reply	What happens when something mechanical gets scaled up. They took the whole printing idea and just made everything faster, sometimes by duplicating hardware (many more hammers), other times by increasing speed (paper feed). Some of the "scaling up" is obvious: a lot more metal in a drum or band than a simple print head, but the difference in cost would be negligible next to how much they could charge rental (or even sale) for being able to make it print so much faster. Far from the first time us humans have done this with technology. Modern gasoline engines can be insanely complicated, even before they got tiny computers everywhere. One of my favourite purely mechanical examples is Bosch's K-Jetronic fuel injection system, used by a wide range of performance engines in the 70s and 80s. Another example I love is helical scan videotape. Four head drums needed four rotary transformers between the two halves of the drum. And later prosumer VCRs had way more than four heads... Wade.
Post #438,694 by pwhysall 3/15/21 3:03:55 AM 3/15/21 3:03:55 AM Reply	Band printers were cool OTOH, they were invariably used to print your bills, so. So loud.

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