That's from Oct. 6. The draft I referenced was Nov. 20, 1964, over six weeks later. The script changed a lot between August and when they started shooting.
The Cage Printer
- Thread starter Disposable_Ensign
- Start date
You're looking at the wrong scene. Check scene 9 on page 12 -- it's the same as the later draft Maurice posted, just with "First Crewman" rather than Garrison. Both drafts have the message-printing device clattering.
How did my post NOT answer your questions, when I pasted these links on Feb 25?
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x00hd/thecagehd0269.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x00hd/thecagehd0270.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x00hd/thecagehd0271.jpg
It was helpful, but the page that I found also gave the transporter controls. Thx.
Line printers and teletypes were actually not that new in 1964 per se - one that could print a full page at the speed that one did though would be considered amazing as most line printers and teletypes that day averaged 1 printed character per second.
Oh, teletypes were much faster than that. Here's a video of a restored 1940 teletype:
In manual mode, it prints out on the receiving machine as fast as you can type it on the sending machine. In automatic mode, using a punch tape, I clock it at about 6-7 characters per second.
It's worth keeping in mind that Gary Seven's "magic" typewriter in "Assignment: Earth" was actually a real piece of office equipment from the day, a forerunner of a modern printer or copier, which could automatically type out multiple copies of a pretyped text using a punch tape similar to what's in the video (rather than being voice-activated as in the episode). So the speed at which we saw it typing out Roberta's words probably reflects the speed at which such a device could actually print something out at the time.
The HP Teletypes I was using in Jr. High were nowhere near that fast - especially over a 110 baud (not k-baud) acoustic modems. They also had CRT monitors in the 1960s and 70s that were lightning fast compared to printouts; but they were way more expensive in those days.
I doubt a junior high school was using the best equipment. I'm thinking more along the lines of what you see in use by news services or police/government agencies in the TV shows and movies of the era. Those could type pretty fast. That's where the "CLATTERING" stage direction in Roddenberry's script comes from -- his real-life experience with such machines.
Those were teletypes. Baudot taps out around 75wpm over airwaves. Hellschreiber was a little faster, theoretically, but realistically was around 115 equivalent to baudot (doesnt use baudot, totally analog), but news services didn't use it, as far as I know. It doesn't matter how fast the tty can go, long distance line limitations and shorwave bandwidth and noice for RTTY are limiting factors. That was how it was.
they were the standard being used at Pierce and CSUN at the time <-- Our equipment and connection came/was to a CSUN HP2000 mainframe while I was there - and when I started in Computer Science at CSUN; I saw the same model still in use (although they had a room with 36 CRT terminals; but time was rationed and there was a daily waiting list where you booked a slot of time to use them. <--- I assume that situation disappeared once PCs with modems hit the scene - but I was already graduated when that phase of PC expansion started to take hold.
I did have a PC with a 300 baud modem by 1986 - and CSUN had a program where Alumni could request an account for internet access - and I started accessing Usenet around that time on a regular basis.
I don't see how it matters. The question is whether a technology that rapidly printed out typed pages would've been familiar or unfamiliar to 1960s audiences. So it's not about comparing specific models, it's about whether anything of the sort existed. And the answer is, yes, machines that could do that had existed for decades prior to "The Cage." So the idea that 1964-6 audiences would've been astonished by such a thing is simply wrong.
No, the average person would not have seen printers print that fast. There very few things that could outside print like that. The only thing that would have printed fast were line printers which could do about 10 pages per minute by the mid 60s. Those were industrial items that, again, very few people working outside of something like a major corporate billing departmart's mainframe campus would have seen.
In everyday life, no. In movies and television, certainly yes. Not to mention books, short stories, etc. As I said, productions about newspapers, government agencies, police, etc. featured characters reading from teletypes all the time. It was not a bizarre, alien concept.
And teletypes did not print very fast. Again, they printed about 75 wpm, max. Could you nudge them faster? Don't know. but no one did. They were electromechanical. The examples I have seen were by the 80's being maintained by hams for RTTY work. Selectrics they were not. I went to school in a college by 93 that was so far behind, technically that we did actually did use Selectric typewriters as letter quality printers running through a quasi-rs-232 card and ribbon to the Tandy 1000's that were the main computers for study and for the office (I was a work study.. these machines were tied by thicknet to an ATT server running Netware 2.. I didn't cherish how bizarre this all was at the time. I digress). The baud rate was about 115 to the printer. So again, even then not very fast. But about as fast as a dot matrix, and honestly not much slower than the rare laser printer of the time, considering buffering times, polling times, and network speeds.
I know your remarkable propinquity for everything, so let's just assume your are right and save a few spurious pages.
Watch the video I linked to above. That's a 1940 model and it easily manages 6-7 characters per second, NOT just one per second.
Ergo about 60 to 100wpm which is what they were geared for
I was responding to Noname Given's assertion that they were only capable of "1 printed character per second." They said character, not word, and that was clearly incorrect.
Again, the exact specifics don't matter. That's losing the forest for the trees. The point is that 1960s audiences would have seen devices like that printer on film or television before. It wouldn't have been some shockingly futuristic sight for them, but something they'd take pretty much in stride. Again, it's not that different from the 1966 Batcomputer spitting out its answers on cards.
