On 01/16/2014 01:30 AM, John Wilson wrote:
At the VCF showing where we met, you had a neighbor, who ran a
Straight 8 system. Next to it was a printer with attached keyboard (or
without it, I can't recall), and a Model 33 teletype with a coil of
paper tape attached to it. What would have been its DEC branded
printer?
The LT33. Um, which is an ASR33 -- not even rebadged (they just added
an additional DEC sticker to the back IIRC).
There's also the reader-run modification..
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
From: Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com>
At the VCF showing where we met, you had a neighbor, who ran a
Straight 8 system. Next to it was a printer with attached keyboard (or
without it, I can't recall), and a Model 33 teletype with a coil of
paper tape attached to it. What would have been its DEC branded
printer?
The LT33. Um, which is an ASR33 -- not even rebadged (they just added
an additional DEC sticker to the back IIRC).
John Wilson
D Bit
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 18:52:08 -0500
The DHV11 has a pair of 8051s on it. The DH11 is several boards full
of logic. It has buffering and DMA capability to offload the host
system...it needs much less hand-holding than the DZ11.
For *output*. They're all basically identical for input, and that's where
you'd actually need help (since you could lose data -- on output you just
might get behind). Offloading input processing would need the mux to be
close personal friends with the TTY driver in each OS, so I see why it
didn't happen, but it would have been *much* more useful.
John Wilson
D Bit
From: <Paul_Koning at Dell.com>
The first device called DECwriter was the LA30, an amazing piece of junk
known to jam every few pages. It also came with a really bad keyboard.
Was it uppercase only?
Yes. I still have mine (LA30P -- no fill characters, but it needs a weird
LC8E interface, and did the LC11 exist too?). The jamming wasn't as annoying
as the fact that it could *only* take 9 7/8" wide paper (tractors were not
adjustable). And the timing was very finicky and didn't seem to use feedback
of any kind (so it had no idea when it printed entire characters as one column
of dots after the head had already finished stepping). But I was still super
impressed that it was so close to useful considering the ancient tech -- it
had a swing-out card-cage full of flip-chips instead of any real brain.
Unspeakably heavy though.
Next came the LA36, which was something entirely different. Rock solid, and
it didn t need fill after carriage return. Upper and lower case, of course.
Still too damn heavy! But yes much better.
The LA120, if I remember right, was the first DEC printing terminal to do
bidirectional printing.
Kick-ass printers (I have two).
The LA180 receive-only printer was, I think, a derivative of the LA36, not
the LA120.
This reminds me of something else but I can't believe I'm drawing a blank on
the name of the company -- who was it that sold a replacement controller
(might have been called something like DS120 or DS180) that turned an LA36
into something faster than an LA120?
John Wilson
D Bit
On 01/15/2014 08:09 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
At the VCF showing where we met, you had a neighbor, who ran a
Straight 8 system.
Yes, Dave Gesswein. Beautiful system. That machine is the in the top
"holy grail" spot of my world.
Next to it was a printer with attached keyboard (or
without it, I can't recall), and a Model 33 teletype with a coil of
paper tape attached to it. What would have been its DEC branded
printer?
There wasn't one at the time, I believe. ASR33s were very common on
PDP-8 systems.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Hello!
Makes sense.
At the VCF showing where we met, you had a neighbor, who ran a
Straight 8 system. Next to it was a printer with attached keyboard (or
without it, I can't recall), and a Model 33 teletype with a coil of
paper tape attached to it. What would have been its DEC branded
printer?
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 8:07 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 01/15/2014 08:03 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
I think they still make dot matrix ones for those applications that
only a printer like that would do. Which includes financials and real
estate and possible insurance.
Yes, dot matrix printers are still being manufactured. Their primary
use is for multi-part forms. One I've seen recently (last week) is an
Okidata Microline 320, with a USB interface, at a truck rental company.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 01/15/2014 08:03 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
I think they still make dot matrix ones for those applications that
only a printer like that would do. Which includes financials and real
estate and possible insurance.
Yes, dot matrix printers are still being manufactured. Their primary
use is for multi-part forms. One I've seen recently (last week) is an
Okidata Microline 320, with a USB interface, at a truck rental company.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Hello!
Reminds me of how in our Apple days, my brother participated in a
course for computers in school. Naturally the others needed to wait
until after school, or worse the next day to do their homework. Jay
did his on ours. And had our new Epson MX100 printer print-out a fancy
banner for it. That printer worked its way past several systems. And
according to Epson they stopped making print heads for it, (alone)
before someone stopped making ribbons.
I think they still make dot matrix ones for those applications that
only a printer like that would do. Which includes financials and real
estate and possible insurance.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 7:32 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 01/15/2014 07:20 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Heh! The DZ-11 is a hog. We all know that.
But the LP11 is not really much better. It's also interrupt per
character unless I remember wrong. But it's only one printer per card,
and no input. And of course, much faster, since it's parallel with
handshaking.
The Unibus controller I used at work, and later at home, with an LA180
was an LS11. I don't remember if it was interrupt-per-character as
well, but since it was fairly non-dense TTL logic, I'd assume it was.
It fared very well on my 11/34 running (at the time) RSX. In the
mid-1980s, I was the first person to turn in high-school homework on
printer paper. Even some of the teachers were asking what kind of
"typewriter" made such "strange-looking print". ;)
You've reminded me of how I was the only person a teacher knew who did a
science project narrated by Microsoft Sam.
-Dave
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 01/15/2014 07:20 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Heh! The DZ-11 is a hog. We all know that.
But the LP11 is not really much better. It's also interrupt per
character unless I remember wrong. But it's only one printer per card,
and no input. And of course, much faster, since it's parallel with
handshaking.
The Unibus controller I used at work, and later at home, with an LA180
was an LS11. I don't remember if it was interrupt-per-character as
well, but since it was fairly non-dense TTL logic, I'd assume it was.
It fared very well on my 11/34 running (at the time) RSX. In the
mid-1980s, I was the first person to turn in high-school homework on
printer paper. Even some of the teachers were asking what kind of
"typewriter" made such "strange-looking print". ;)
You've reminded me of how I was the only person a teacher knew who did a science project narrated by Microsoft Sam.
-Dave
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 01/15/2014 07:20 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Heh! The DZ-11 is a hog. We all know that.
But the LP11 is not really much better. It's also interrupt per
character unless I remember wrong. But it's only one printer per card,
and no input. And of course, much faster, since it's parallel with
handshaking.
The Unibus controller I used at work, and later at home, with an LA180
was an LS11. I don't remember if it was interrupt-per-character as
well, but since it was fairly non-dense TTL logic, I'd assume it was.
It fared very well on my 11/34 running (at the time) RSX. In the
mid-1980s, I was the first person to turn in high-school homework on
printer paper. Even some of the teachers were asking what kind of
"typewriter" made such "strange-looking print". ;)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
