Friden Flexowriter
From neurotica.com
This is a Friden Flexowriter SPS teleprinter. It was given to me by my friend Andrew Bressen in 2009. It resides in my living room, where it has become quite the conversation piece. "SPS" is an abbreviation for Systems Programatic[1] Single-case, which means it's designed to be connected electrically to other things (computers, phone lines, other Flexowriters, etc), and it has an uppercase-only printing mechanism. Some parts of its design date back to the 1920s; they were produced until the early 1970s.
Flexowriters can produce typed output or punched paper tape from three input sources:
- A human typing on the keyboard
- The built-in paper tape reader
- A serial digital data stream from a connected computer or modem
They can also produce serial digital data streams (available on a large connector on the side of the unit) from the keyboard or the paper tape reader. This I/O flexibility makes Flexos, as they're affectionately known, very capable devices when used as computer terminals. Their use in this capacity was largely supplanted by the TTC Corporation's model ASR-33 Teletype in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Flexowriters were used as interactive terminals and as output devices on several very early computers, including the DEC PDP-1, the Librascope LGP-30 and the CDC 160. An ancestor of this machine, the Electromatic, was used as an output device on the Harvard Mark-I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, which was one of the world's first automatic digital computers.
- ↑ This is the way it's spelled in the Friden documentation.
Photos
 Left front view of the Flexowriter. |
 Right front view of the Flexowriter. |
 Close-up view of the paper tape reader/punch assembly. This unit's reader and punch can also handle edge-punched cards. |