[HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?

On Jan 15, 2014, at 1:26 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote: Hello! Oddly enough the phone company besides having a good interest in things DEC related, also made stuff in Dayton....... Which model was considered to be a DECwriter? I seem to recall seeing one once, and also recall the discussions concerning the thing in a certain novel........ (Or other book) 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? I don t remember anymore. It needed fill after the carriage return or it would lose characters (and jam even more often, too). We had one in college for a short while. 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. The LA120, if I remember right, was the first DEC printing terminal to do bidirectional printing. It used the T-11 as its microcontroller to make that level of sophistication possible. The LA180 receive-only printer was, I think, a derivative of the LA36, not the LA120. The 1976 Peripheral handbook seems to support that. Note that there also was an LA35, a receive-only variant of the LA36. The difference is that the LA35 had a serial interface while the LA180 had a parallel (line printer style) interface. paul