I think any of these would look hilarious hooked up to a Raspberry Pi running SIMH.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +44 7961 149465
On 15 Jan 2014, at 21:16, Hans Vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote:
ISTR an LA34, as the console for a PDP-11/40.
Bidirectional.
Van: Paul_Koning at
Dell.com
Verzonden: woensdag 15 januari 2014 19:37
Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Onderwerp: Re: [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