On 30/11/2025 17:32, peter--- via cctalk wrote:
Hi Fred,
The keyboard character set seems pretty standard - though I do notice that it has a
United Kingdom currency symbol (£) but has a US power cord and is wired for 110 v.
When I worked at Refuge Assurance, Manchester, England we had a suite
of Flexowriters. As we used them to prepare policy documents, so they
had £ symbols but were run from 110volt transformers.
Perhaps this was the normal way of using Flexowriters in the UK...
I know when they were retired some were re-purposed for home computers
and also to run a mail merge system. Could yours be one of these?
I did find an image of a Flexowriter with two front panel lamps in this document, p32,
image on p33
https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/friden/brochures/SP9012_Friden_Data…
Seems like the extra lamp was associated with verification of control tapes for
numerically controlled metalworking machines. Though from the description the machine
that I have is different again (my machine does not have an ERROR RESET button)
Could be for lots of other uses, see below..
Machine front panel switches are
(left side)
START READ
STOP READ
SINGLE READ
NON_PRINT
(right side)
[blank]
OPT STOP
CODE DELETE
RUN OUT
So the mystery still remains
OK so we used them to prepare Life Assurance Policy
Documents and paper
tape for input to the computer. For each policy we produced:-
1. The Policy Document
2. An "Envelope" which was a car sleeve to protect the policy
3. A paper Tape used to add the policy to the master file on the
computer system, a Honeywell H3200 which was basically an IBM1401 clone.
I think each Flexowriter had a reader, internal punch and a second
external punch.
In order to streamline the process we had a library of paper tapes that
contained the "standard" text for each policy.
The process was the operator loaded the library tape which printed the
policy stopping whenever information unique to a particular case, e.g.
policy number, name, address was required.
As well as printing the policy these tapes produced two output tapes,
one containing the information for the master file.
The second had the info for the policy envelope or sleeve. This was then
used as input to print the envelope.
So the operator input one set of data and got three outputs, a policy, a
container and a computer record.
So perhaps your machine was used in a similar data entry system...
NOTES:-
1. We didn't read the paper tape directly on the Honeywell, we had a
modified Honeywell Key-to-Tape machine which had a tape reader hacked
into the keyboard circuit....
2. W didn't print the Policies on the mainframe as we only had uppercase
print trains..
Peter
Dave
G4UGM