regarding schiffli lassser embroidery machines

The complications with embroidery formats today are largely due to hysterical, ah, excuse me, historical reasons. It may interest you to know that one of the first things we did at Wilcom when we started working in embroidery software was to recommend to the machinery manufacturers a universal tape format, or tape code as we called it. Their response was deafening in its silence. In the beginning was the Jacquard... The first embroidery design "formats" were the coding schemes by which the XY stitch movements were recorded onto punched tape used by the mechanical Jacquard mechanisms which controlled the early automatic embroidery machines. So in the beginning, there were really only 3 formats - the 46 channel "Plauen" card, also referred to as the Zahn or Vomag card system, for Schiffli machines, the 22 channel "Saurer" card for the Saurer brand schiffli machines, and the so called "68 millimeter jacquard" card used on the early multihead embroidery machines, beginning with the "Wurker" machine. Surprisingly, all early multihead machine manufacturers used the same 68 mm jacquard card format. Including Wurker, Gross, Marco, Tajima, Barudan, Zangs, and perhaps others. In later years there were minor variations to the 68 mm card to incorporate new technical innovations such as... (wait for it) ... jump stitch, ! But basically, you could run a design card punched for one machine on pretty well all other machines. The biggest difference to watch out for was that most machines were set up mechanically to interpret the one unit of movement on a tape as 1/10 mm, but some machines were set to use it as 1/6 mm. With the +/- 40 units of movement possible on a 68 mm jacquard, this gave either a +/- 4.0 mm maximum stitch length, or a +/- 6.7 mm maximum stitch length respectively, but at the expense of slightly less accuracy on the end point placement of stitches. An interesting thing technically with these 3 original formats is the number system used in each, which, by the way, is also a great contibutor to later divergence in tape formats. The Plauen card system used a system of "tens" and "ones" to define stitch distances. The Saurer card system used a "base 7" number system, where different hole positions on the card were valued at different multiples of 7. And the 68 mm Jacquard system used a ternary, or base 3 number system ! This is all very confusing to us humans who use base 10, and to computers which use binary, or base 2. But I'm sure there were good reasons for the strange original systems - after all they had mechanical punching (digitizing) machines to create the design tapes, and mechanical "computers" called automats to read the punched tape and control the embroidery machine. Then came the BYTE ... The problems really started when different machinery manufacturers started applying computers and electronics to the basic XY drive systems of embroidery machines. With electronics came that wonderful [not] new invention of 8 channel paper tape - also referred to as one inch tape. The computer industry had already virtually given up 8 channel paper tape in favour of magnetic media, but embroiderers liked being able to see the punched holes, so there you go. And after all - 8 channel paper tape was in fact 62 % smaller than 68 mm jacquard ! I'm sure the stock prices of Facit and GNT got a good boost from this. So with electronics and computers, all the machine manufacturers were faced with designing a method of coding embroidery designs onto 8 channel paper tapes. And of course they all picked a different solution. My guess is that it was because the respective engineers at the different companies independently came up with different solutions to a common problem, which engineers are prone to do. But they were probably also trying to keep this new technology secret from their competitors. At least most of them standardized on 3 rows on the 8 channel tape per stitch, or 3 eight-bit "bytes" per stitch in computer terms. Tajima chose an 8 channel tape code which used a direct hole-for-hole representation of the existing 68 mm jacquard coding system. They extended the code to allow stitches as long as +/- 121 units, or 12.1mm, and with the few additional holes left over, defined jump stitches and stop codes. This solution had the advantage that existing 68 mm jacquard cards could be very easily converted to or from 8 channel tape, with very simple electronics. Great compatibility, and low cost. Even today, Tajima's "tape format" is referred to as "ternary" , after the base 3 system used in 68 mm jacquard. The Eltac machine company, (the forerunner of Happy), also used the ternary tape format, with very minor differences in end-of-desing coding. Barudan took a different approach, and abandoned the ternary coding system in favour of the binary coding system used by computers. This gave the advantage that XY stitch movements could be recorded on paper tape almost like they were stored in the computer. It also provided an increase in maximum stitch length to +/- 12.7 mm, and they had even more holes "left over" with which to define extra machine functions. So now you could not only program a "color change" command, you could even define which needle number of the multi-needle machine to change to. Great stuff. But incompatible with Tajima's. Zangs, the forerunner to ZSK, also chose a binary coding system for their electronic machines, but alas, a different binary scheme than Barudan. But at least it was 3 bytes per stitch. And surely with computers, changing from one format to another is easy, right ? Ha. For computers maybe, but it's been a pain in the neck for the rest of us. Ultramatic was perhaps the first (?) machinery maker to adopt electronics and 8 channel paper tape to embroidery machines. It also embraced the binary numbering system for its tape code, but, you guessed it, differently from all the others. Many in the industry may not know that Melco got its start working jointly with Ultramatic. They split from Ultramatic just before the 1980 Bobbin Show, which was where Wilcom announced itself to the world with our CED system - the world's first computer graphic digitizing system. But that is another story. Melco took things even further with the binary coding system for stitch data. In addition to the 8 channel tape code they had worked with Ultramatic, Melco devised a new binary format that used only 2 bytes per stitch instead of the normal 3 bytes. At least for some stitches. Stitches larger than a certain value required 4 bytes per stitch. This format could be stored in the electronic machine in less RAM memory - which was very expensive at the time. Now you really did need a computer to handle this type of data coding. This format has been extended over time, and is now known as the Melco 'expanded' format, or .EXP. When Wilcom started developing its Computer Graphics digitizing systems, we had to of course provide tape output which was compatible with the machines of the day. So we dutifully programmed all the formats, since the machinery manufacturers were not terribly interested in a common format. We understood them all, (eventually), but embroiderers struggle with them still. Followed (eventually) by the DISK... Melco was perhaps the first embroidery machinery maker to use computer disks in the early 1980's to read embroidery designs. Of course (!) this was before the IBM PC, and there were no standards for floppy disks at the time. Well actually there were - about a dozen or more "standards". Most popular in those early days of micro-computers were variations of the disk format used by the CP/M computer operating system. But CP/M isn't even heard of these days. So in addition to the different "tape formats", which defined the stitch data of a design, embroiderers now had to contend with different "disk formats", plus different "file formats" for files stored on these disks. (And you call this progress, I hear you groan ?). And yes, all the machine manufacturers repeated the same strategy - they all invented their own "disk format". Some liked it so much they even invented several disk formats ! Old timers in computers would remember the rare 8 inch floppy disks (luckily never used with embroidery machines). Then 5 1/4 inch floppy disks were popular for many years in computers, but used only by Melco (?) in embroidery machines. Finally 3 1/2 inch (not so floppy) disks became popular, and these were well suited to embroidery machines. Luckily, pretty well everyone now uses a common 3 1/2 inch disks, which look the same, but unfortunately are still formatted differently, and have different types of files on them, for different brands of embroidery machines. Tajima was the first machinery maker to adopt the IBM PC DOS format floppy disk for their embroidery machines. Some other makers have now also done this, but many formats are still "non-DOS" disks, which are still problematic with modern computer systems these days. The "files" on the early embroidery disks were pretty much just an exact copy of the "bytes" of data normally stored on a paper tape. Compatibility with the past is very important after all. More recently, additional useful information was added to the disk files, usually in the form of "headers". Wilcom's early "tape files", for example .T01, .T03, .T05 etc, were byte images of tape data. The .T01 stored a Tajima tape image, the .T03 a Barudan format tape image, etc. These tape files included an early Wilcom innovation - the "man readable" label. I remember programming this, because I was having difficulty keeping track of which tapes were which. So I devised a system of hole patterns on the tape which formed the letters of the alphabet, and the digits. I automatically punched the design number, the description, the date, and the format right onto the tape, and left a long leader of blank tape before the start of the actual stit