EXTEL CORPORATION

A Brief History
As recoded by Jim Haynes

August 27, 2001 

Shortly after Walt Zenner retired as Vice President of Research and Development
at the Teletype Corporation in 1964 he and Peter Mero, developer of the Electrowriter,
formed the Quotemasrer Corp.

The company started small with just a couple of technicians working under the
direction of Zenner in a leased building in Rosemont near the O'Hare airport. Their first
product was a stock ticker. It had a continuously running typewheel and printing was
done on the fly. There were already stock tickers on the market but the Quotemaster had
a unique selection feature. A customer could gel up the stock symbols he was following
and the ticket would print only those symbols as trades were made on the exchanges.
This eliminated the usual searching through hundreds of feet or paper tape for the stock
trades a customer was interested in.

TransLux, the company that made projectors for the stock exchange purchased
the right to the product and planned for its manufacture. Shortly thereafter, the economy
took a downturn and production plans were put on hold.

In addition to the product Translux wanted the right to the name Quotemaster.
This was granted but now the company had to find a new name. In England the telegraph
systems are operated by the federal government along with the telephone and post office.
The London stock exchange had a private telegraph company for its ticker and financial
news operations. This company was called the Exchange Telegraph but people used a
very popular nick name, Ex Tel. This nick name was not registered so Peter adopted it
for the new name of this small company. The name added prestige in Europe out of
proportion to the American company with a staff or five.

With the inflow of funds from the sale of the ticker, work began on a dot matrix
printer. By 1969 a first model had been developed. Electronics for the printer was solid­
state transistor logic, with the mechanical parts limited to a stepping motor to control the
position of the print head and magnet driven needles to print the matrix character. The
mechanical part of the printer was almost ridiculously simple. The logic that converted
the incoming teletypewriter characters to the 5 x 7 matrix characters was a major part of
the electronics. As the first model approached completion Texas Instrument announced
the development of a single chip which was perfectly suited for this purpose, It was
immediately included in the product, resulting in an excellent system.

The small staff had started with a totally new concept and after one year, had a
working model of a very attractive product. The bank account, however, was gone.

Mero had never been enthusiastic about the product but now had to sell it - - there
was no alternative. He took it to New York and demonstrated it to Reuters, the business
news company. He returned from the trip and told Zenner excitedly and with some awe
in his voice "They liked it."

As the sales negotiation proceeded, a group of Reuters executives visited the
Extel factory, Mero arranged for eleven additional people to populate the factory floor
during the exhibit and demonstrations, since there were only five people on staff in the
company at that time.

Reuters ordered a substantial number of printers and with their order in hand,
Mereo set about to raise funds for the forthcoming manufacture of the printers. Kemper
Insurance Company bought 51% of the company, and with new funds the company
leased factory space in the: northern suburb of Northbrook. At this point Zenner lost
interest as the company's activities changed from research and development to mass
production and he resigned from the company, (still holding his half of the 49% of the
remaining shares).

Peter Mero continued as President and Vice President of Sales. As production
increased and printers were put in service, he sold this specialized printer to about 30
different news companies around the world.

Extel continued to produce the printer and manufactured about a quarter million printers.

Zenner said that, in his opinion the Extel printer was the first successful dot matrix teleprinter.

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Added  commentary  by Jim Haynes to Ed Sharpe - 

You probably know that it is frequently asserted that ExTel came from
"ex-Teletype" and now you know from the co-founder that is not true.
However there were ex-Teletype people at Extel.

Another player in this game was Qwint, which had at least one ex-Teletype,
ex-Extel guy on its staff. They were located a bit north of Skokie and
Northbrook, in Lake County. See http://juliepalooza.8m.com/sl/qwint.htm

which says it was a cleverly designed product, but came to market about
the time hardcopy terminals were disappearing.

The UGC-129 printer was made by Tracor in Austin for the Air Force.
There were two models. The original used a type element just like that
of the MITE printer; however everything was done with stepper motors
rather than with mechanical "logic". The second model used a dot-matrix
print head, and also had an LED or LCD display bar.

The UGC-74 printer was developed by Kleinschmidt but manufactured by
others. The original model used a print drum. Kleinschmidt had earlier
made some drum printers; and Teletype had done one for the Signal Corps
back in the 50s and decided not to pursue that technology. Later models
of the UGC-74 used dot matrix printing. All models are excessively heavy.
I've heard these were used by the military as late as the Iraq war
because they are well sealed against sand. Keyboards have terrible
touch, but then I guess that is necessary with the moving parts shielded
from sand by rubber boots.

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Jim Haynes Comments on Patents  


For patents see 2,977,180 3,114,490 3,116,964 3,143,599 and one
that probably leads to something more, 3,150,915. Also 3,185,993

3,249,922 is the Quotemaster.

The thing about 3,150,915 is that it was issued to Dixon and Darsie
of Dixon Automatic Tool Co. in Rockford IL. Mostly that company
made factory machinery, including doing a lot of work for Teletype.
And when Teletype was charged with developing a fax machine, Dixon
was chosen as the subcontractor.

_________________________________________________________

                            BELTS

Jerry Murphy tells us: "Regarding belts: There are at least two companies
that sell cogged belts on-line: One is B and B Manufacturing -- www.bbman.com
 -- and the other is Stock Drive Products / Sterling Instrument -- www.sdp-si.com.
 They both have extensive catalogs and you may be able to find a suitable belt 
for your EXTEL machine."