[TriLUG] Piece of History

[Len Boyle]

One of the first systems I worked on had three large band printers for green bar paper. The normal band had two sets of ascii characters but the computer operators could swap out the band for one with one set of ALA characters. My fuzzy memory says that the printer did 1200 132 character wide lines per minute.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf Of Tarus Balog
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 7:02 PM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Piece of History


On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:25 PM, Judy Hallman wrote:

> My first experience with modems was with a teletype, connected to TUCC
> (Triangle University's Computation Center).

Okay, I can't beat that, but I my first printer was a GE TermiNet that
my Dad picked up for about $300 (he was a GE employee at the time).

The TRS-80 didn't have serial drivers (the $2000 9-pin dot matrix
printers they sold were parallel only) so I had to write my own in
assembly (hand coded with a lot of help from Kilobaud Microcomputing
magazine). The TermiNet was a freaky printer - it had a bank of 118
little hammers and the type consisted of little metal fingers on a
rotating band. The character set was represented twice on the band and
when the proper character came whizzing by the ribbon would pop up and
the hammer would strike to print the character. It was really nice
quality and a lot less than a daisywheel printer, although it did
sound like a Sherman tank was coming down the road when I did print.

-T

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