to interrupt the nerd party but the young lady IS PRETTY.
Sorry about the shouting.

Not the printer, but the young lady.

My generation was one of the last to use it. I liked it; it took a bit more gumption to search the cards than it does to type in a box. I wrote many a fine term paper in my day without computer assistance, many composed on--gasp--notebook paper, then rewritten on an electric typewriter.

[I'll bet you miss the dictionary, too. -Dave]

Seeing it in the context of a library is quite humorous. It was a drum printer with 132 solenoid type hammers which battered the paper onto the drum at up to 1600 lines per minute. The resulting noise was appalling and audible through several brick walls.

Print quality was variable. A good engineer could set it up so that the printed lines weren't wavy (the blow-up of the text shown by Dave looks really good), but such engineers were not common judging by most of the printout I received.

I still attribute my apparent deafness to some of my wife's conversations to hours spent watching my listings coming off this printer.

The printer is attached to a 'Univac 490 Real-Time Computer System', a large and expensive mainframe used particularly in the airline reservation business. Hence the nameplate stating '490 Printer'. The system was one of the earliest to be used for online transaction processing - an ancient predecessor to the Internet.

"To the rescue. Many librarians believe computers are the only means to effectively cope with their bulging bookshelves."

Click to enlarge.

The Univac 490 (circa 1963) was a 30 bit word machine that used drum memory for storage. When you ordered one, it took 18 months to deliver.