On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 8:26 AM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
> I pretty much left the world of daisywheel printers when the first HP > Laserjet broke onto the scene. Beautiful output--and so much faster > and quieter! ) Agreed, although I'd love an HP9871 for my HP9830, just to see that mechanism work (it has a pair of DC motors on the main chassis, if they rotate in the same direction it spins the daisywheel, if they rotate in opposite directions it moves the carriage. Or maybe the other way round). I do have the right interface for the HP9830. Getting back to an earlier message, the 'Apple Plot' program for the Apple ][ included a high-res graphics screen dump program to the Qume Sprint 5. It only used the full stop (period) character, moved the carriage and paper using the proportional spacing commands, and made a heck of racket. I have a printer which consists of a Diablo 630 chassis with a dot matrix head. A Sanders 700. It takes little ROM cartridges for the fonts (alas no downloadable fonts sor graphics mode) and does up to 8 passes to produce almost daisywheel quality output. I also have the older Sanders 12/7 which takes sets of EPROMs for the fonts and is I think better made, but is otherwise similar to the user. Internally they are very different, the 12/7 has a single Z80 processor, DMA channels for data input and printhead output and a state machine to actually control the printhead. The 700 has the Z80 processor too, but with a Z8 for data input and another Z8 to fire the printhead. -tony > > --Chuck
