Friden Flexowriter SFD

UvA Computer Museum catalogue nr 93.43

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The Friden Flexowriter, model SFD, was used with the early Electrologica X1 computer. Though it was improbably heavy and made the noise of a machine gun, it had about the same functionality as the well-known Teletype ASR33 teleprinter. But at least by X1 customers, it was never used on-line. Rather the user would carry his prepared lengths of paper tape on bicycle to the computer centre.

The illustration shows a Flexowriter with 8-channel papertape equipment. However 7-channel tape was common as well. Apart from that, there were appreciable differences between the coding schemes used by the various Flexowriter models. As an example, the coding conventions of the Mathematical Centre's Flexowriters are given here.
The Flexowriter, originally am IBM development, was manufactured or at least assembled in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, from (about) 1955 to 1965.

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Our Flexowriter has been used at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam. It is still in excellent working condition.