01-12-2019, 06:51 AM
Wish I could afford this old ticker tape machine.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Antique-Ediso...Swj-5du6EE
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Antique-Ediso...Swj-5du6EE
Ticker tape.
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01-12-2019, 06:51 AM
Wish I could afford this old ticker tape machine.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Antique-Ediso...Swj-5du6EE
It would make an interesting talking point working away in the living room. Perhaps one better than glowing valves LOL
01-12-2019, 11:58 PM
I remember seeing one of these working in the early 70s.
I was fixing a monitor in the N American department of a large stockbrokers near London Bridge. They had a 75 baud transatlantic direct line which gave them a continuous live feed. They sat round a long, wide desk with a central shelf unit for files, etc. I was fascinated by the ingenious system that someone had provided for them. The ticker tape machine sat at one end and a channel had been fixed to both sides and the end of the shelf unit in which the ticker tape ran. After leaving the print head it ran along the desk unit. The senior partner sat next to the machine, so was the first to read it. The further along the desk and back up the other side staff sat, the lower down the pecking order they were! Eventually the tape ran back to the machine before ending up in a large waste basket. I can only assume the paper feed mechanism was specially modified to pull the tape along its lengthy route! The beauty of the system was that, as the tape was just above eye height, everybody on both sides of the table had the opportunity to read it so, if those ahead of them were busy on the phone, or whatever, and missed an important item, it was still likely to be spotted further down the line.
02-12-2019, 08:14 AM
Stock tickers go back to the 1860s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape
I'm sure they were expensive back then, but stockbroking was a business that could afford to pay. The terms "tick", "tape" and "tickertape" are still widely used, despite the macines being long obsolete.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
02-12-2019, 11:55 AM
Apart from that one machine that I saw "in the flesh", I only saw them in pictures, particularly films set in 1920s America. However, they were obviously still widely used in 1960, in the US at least, as this picture of a TickerTape parade for Richard Nixon shows.
Of course it may be that they kept stocks of tape for long redundant machines just for these ceremonial occasions! In the City of London in the early 70s I encountered lots of Reuters and Extel (Exchange Telegraph) teleprinters - large floor standing machines. The Reuters machines were modern, quiet ones that caused no bother but the Extel machines were atrocious! Ancient machines in battered wooden cabinets, When they started up they made a racket loud enough to wake the dead - probably why they had usually been banished to empty corridors! But that wasn't all ... If we received a report "All the pictures keep jumping", head straight for the Excel machine. Most corridors were glazed above waist height so it was usually easy to view one or more of our terminals from somewhere close by. Watch the pictures jumping and wait for the machine to stop for a breather whereupon the screens would stabilise. Alternatively, if the machine was taking a break, wait for it to start up again! Diagnosis proved, find the Office Manager and give him a demonstration, then leave it for him to contact Extel! All of our RF cabling was double screened so those machines were certainly chucking out a lot of unwanted RF! Of course, our cabling usually shared the same corridor that the machine had been banished to ... What always fascinated me about those machines was that hardly anybody ever went near them! Occasionally someone would lift up the paper, scan the last couple of reports and continue on their way. In some offices, someone would come along at regular intervals and cut the paper into manageable lengths and hang them from a rail on the adjacent wall but I never saw anybody standing there reading them! Don't misunderstand me - I didn't make a habit of staking out these machines! However, if tracing a cable fault in the corridor, moving from tap to tap every few feet (at ceiling level!) it could take quite some time! I reckon that TickerTape, plodding back and forth along that shelf at a leisurely 7.5 characters per second, got a lot more attention than any Extel - or Reuters - machine I ever saw!
02-12-2019, 12:01 PM
(02-12-2019, 08:14 AM)ppppenguin Wrote: I'm sure they were expensive back then, but stockbroking was a business that could afford to pay. Purely based on volume. Moving from a retail environment to the London Stock Exchange I was amazed by just how little difference there was between the buying and selling prices. A margin of a couple of coppers on many shares.
02-12-2019, 01:09 PM
The salami slicing principle. Basis of a number of frauds. Take a tiny amount, down in the rounding errors, from gazillions of transactions and you make some serious dosh.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
02-12-2019, 01:40 PM
There were a few occasions when the Extel machine was innocent when an "All the pictures keep jumping" fault was investigated.
The electronic calculator was in its infancy and machines like this were used in large numbers. That is manually operated and relatively small compared with many I encountered. A roomful of them all driven by un-suppressed electric motors could really create a lot of RFI! (And noise!)
02-12-2019, 01:44 PM
Nobody cared much about RFI from cars until TV made it visible.
Now it seems that nobody much cares about LW/MW/SW where interference from switchmode PSUs, ethernet over mains, etc can make reception difficult.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
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