CONSOLE PRINTER (1053 SELECTRIC PRINT ONLY) DEVICE CONTROLLER
The controller logic for the console printer is only a bit larger in scope than the keyboard controller logic. It consists of five ALD pages rather than the two of the keyboard circuitry. Mostly it decodes the 16 bit word written by a programmer that selects a typewriter character or function.
There is one single shot in the circuit which times the duration of solenoid activation. The typewriter has a number of 48V solenoids that cause it to perform actions. They are in four main groups - character selection, function selection, upper/lower shift and ribbon color shift.
The Selectric print mechanism (original not Selectric II or III) uses an 88 character typeball. It is really two 44 character hemispheres that are rotated between to select upper or lower case (on a typewriter). That is, when the Shift key is held on a Selectric typewriter the machine takes a power cycle and rotates the ball 180 degrees, doing another cycle when Shift is released.
That is one complication of this printer, the need to perform extra power cycles to rotate the ball to the upper or lower position before doing a cycle to type a given character. The ball used on the 1130 (and IBM S/360) console printers does not have lower case characters, so that the letters A to Z are repeated on both hemispheres as capitalized letters. What varies between hemispheres are the other characters, some are located on the 'lower case' side and some on the 'upper case' side.
The 44 different characters on a ball are selected by tilting to one of four tiers and then rotating among 11 positions. Two bits select one of four tilt levels. Four bits select a rotation amount, from -5 to +5 which includes 0, no rotation. IBM names these the T1, T2, R1, R2, R2A and R5 bits for reasons having to do with the design of the 'whiffletree' mechanical decoding mechanism that converts the bit values into proper amounts of rotation and tilt.
The character selection solenoids consist of the T1, T2, R1, R2, R2A and R5 solenoids, plus one more named AUX. The reason for that is subtle. One position on each hemisphere is where there is zero tilt and zero rotation. For the 1130 typeball, these are the period and the cent characters.
The act of a solenoid turning on trips the typewriter mechanism to take one cycle where it prints what was selected by the solenoids. For the bit value of 000000 for period or cent, there is no activation therefore nothing to trip the machine. To handle this special case, IBM added an AUX solenoid that will also trip a print cycle.
In addition to our six bits that select the tilt and rotate, we have a seventh bit that specifies which of the ball hemispheres, upper or lower, is desired. If the bit value differs from the current position of the typeball, the machine will fire a shift-to-upper or a shift-to-lower solenoid which triggers a print cycle to turn the ball but inhibits the ball actually striking the ribbon.
Since the bit is written by the programmer at the same time as the six character selection bits we actually want to print, the controller logic has to turn this into two cycles - a first cycle to rotate the ball when needed and a second cycle to trip the character selection solenoids. That is a complication that the controller has to handle, as well as determining when to fire the AUX solenoid.
The function group of solenoids will trigger a cycle to space, backspace, tab, line feed or carrier return. Again, when that solenoid activates, it triggers a print cycle for the machine but when doing a function like this, printing is inhibited so the ball doesn't strike the ribbon or paper. To select a function, an eighth bit is required, called the control bit. When it is 0, the other bits are encoding tilt, rotate and shift. When the bit is 1, the value of the other seven bits indicates which of the five function solenoids to trigger.
The color shift solenoids move a lever so that the ribbon black ink or red ink halves are positioned between the type ball and the paper. No cycle is needed to move the ribbon color, but this still requires writing a word with the control bit set to 1.
Thus a programmer writes eight bit codes to the device controller, either a character to print or one of the functions to perform. The controller decodes the bits to fire the appropriate solenoids in the appropriate sequence if a upper or lower shift is needed.
The Selectric mechanism has some microswitches to indicate the time during a print cycle when the mechanism is 'busy' and additional solenoids should not be fired. This status blocks the device controller so that it can fire off solenoids at the fastest rate the mechanism can handle, about 15.5 characters per second. This is the reason that a 110 baud speed exists, it supports sending the seven bits of a printable character as fast as the typewriter can spew them out.
Some switches block the controller for longer periods, such as when the carrier is moving during a tab or return operation. One switch senses when paper has run out and causes the device controller to report the printer as not ready.
HOW I COULD DO TESTING BEFORE REMOVING GUM AND RESTORING THE 1053
I put a simple jumper on the connections to fool the controller, indicating that there was paper in the typewriter. That altered the device status word to show the printer as ready. I could then issue an XIO Write to Area 1, the printer, to send it the eight bits (left justified in bits 0 to 7 of an 1130 word).
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| Indicating paper is in the typewriter |
I set up some simple code to do that, writing a word of B000 to the printer. This is a non-control, capital letter U from the lower case side of the ball. It should trip some tilt and rotate solenoids inside the printer.
RESULTS OF THE TESTING
When I issue the XIO, I can hear the solenoids click inside the typewriter mechanism, in the character selection group. It is of an appropriate duration to fire off one print cycle.
Further, the machine jumps into Interrupt Level 4 and the device status word, returned with an XIO Sense Device, shows bit 0 high which is the Printer Response. The controller reports a successful print of the letter U.
A great deal is working properly although I can't verify that it is fully decoding the characters or functions properly at this point. I may be able to test that using a slow-motion video of the solenoids as I send different character and function codes to the machine - if I don't plug in my 1053 emulator and verify things that way.
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