From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog at lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2020 15:36:19 +1100 Subject: [COFF] Daisy wheel printers (was: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature) In-Reply-To: References: <20201106014109.GP26296@mcvoy.com> <175409f6-af94-601e-3db3-a5af5d7f64d0@gmail.com> <20201106225825.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com> Message-ID: <20201109043619.GO99027@eureka.lemis.com> On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 16:04:16 -0500, Clem Cole wrote: > On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 5:58 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy wheel printers I knew >> (Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing. > > I never used that brand. Xerox (which was the main USA supplier as a pure > typewriter to compete with IBM's Selectric 'ball' units) were definitely > fixed width. People started to hack the Xerox units to add access to > serial interface and Xerox made it standard or maybe an option as > somepoint. IIRC it was somebody like Ollivetti that originally did the > daisywheel and Xerox licensed it and they definitely were the primary > player here. But by the late 70s, early 80's, there were a number of > manufacturers of them. The Qume printers seemed to have been the best round 1980 when we used them in our applications. In particular, a large choice of wheels and fine-grained spacing. I forget how the spacing worked. > But by the late 1970's the serial interface was a first class part > of the unit, which made them different from IBM Selectrics which did > not have an easy to access serial interface, even though IBM used > the printer mechanism from the Selectric as the guts of the console > for the 360 which I think was called a 2150 but the bits in my brain > on that are extremely stale. The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the /360 itself. The model numbers I recall were 735, and the newer generation 2731/2735. The last digit related to the carriage width (11"/15"). Round the time in question I bought a second-hand 735 machine. It had an arcane interface that directly talked to the magnets. I built an interface for it to a parallel port, but it never worked well. Not the interface: the 735 was second-hand and basically worn out, and it kept coming out of adjustment. The Qume machines were *so* much easier to use. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: