This container currently holds sewing pins. The text that wraps around: P2HEWARQI60P3HL51EHCBDRA01PKFGNBYCXDWA5SJ4
the text has no clear beginning or ending.
Here is the bottom:
The container is 5.5cm in diameter.
Burroughs was an early mainframe computer company simaler to IBM. That is a tin from a ribbon found on a teletype machine, a sort of automated typewriter that acted as the input/output terminal for old mainframe computers. The text in their branding is representative to the text the teletype (or later line printers) would type.
Source: I have used these back in the 70s
Pic of Teletype machine https://c8.alamy.com/comp/3BARCJR/pavia-lombardy-italy-march-13-2025-teletype-model-33-teleprinter-introduced-in-1963-it-was-the-first-computer-terminal-used-by-bill-gates-sho-3BARCJR.jpg
Thank you, this is very cool! I enjoy interacting with a screen-based terminal. I’ve never seen a teletypewriter in-person :)
That is a tin from a ribbon found on a teletype machine, a sort of automated typewriter that acted as the input/output terminal for old mainframe computers.
I have used these back in the 70s
I had a half baked, abandoned steampunk story I was writing that featured that … it’s weird to see someone talk about having used something two steps removed from a telegraph machine.
Yeah, my Jr. High had them as a pass down from the high school that had VDTs (video display terminals). By the time I got to HS we had PCS. Here is an interesting thing for your story, if you wanted to keep your programs you would have to list it out while the paper tape punch (thing on the left) was on. Then to run it again on a different day you would feed the tape back through and it would re-type your program in.
thank you for that cool story. My story however, is long abandoned, but something fun to share is that the idea behind it was to have a steampunk chatroom through the use of typewriters hooked up to telegram cables to basically be teletype machines.
Those ramdom characters apper to be part of the brand image.
https://ribbontinvirtualmuseum.com/burroughs-ribbon/Thank you for your work. I didn’t expect to see that it’s random across each item!
Typewriter ribbon box.
The text is I assume just advertising the quality of random letters.This is what typewriters and dot matrix printers used to print text onto paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_ribbon
Typewriter ribbon?
This is absolutely a container for a spare/replacement typewriter ribbon.
As for what that text around the rim means, though, that’s still a mystery. Maybe it’s just decorative, a random assortment displaying the kinds of letters and numbers one might be typing with this ribbon? Kind of for advertisement purposes… Looking at the font of the letters, they look pretty clean and uniform (for a typewriter), so maybe it was meant to suggest that this was a high-quality ribbon that would help you type cleaner-looking letters?
(Still, if that’s the case, then their marketing department kind of missed an opportunity there, to instead spell out something that would hopefully make it more appealing than purely random numbers and letters.)
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood the question.
