Marnie wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>> The one thing I miss about dot matrix is the fan-fold paper. It's just
>> brilliant for printing out a whole file of program code without having
>> it broken up into pages. Oh and laser-printed ASCII art just has no
>> soul :)
> =======
> I really miss that too. I still have a dot matrix packed away. Simply because
> I have some of that paper left. Not sure there would be drivers for it
> anymore, but probably.
Well if either of you want ASCII art printed with *real* 'soul'
(or a reminder of what "no page breaks" really means), send me
a file on paper tape and I'll print it out on my TeleType. ;-)
(But it won't be good for C listings, as it's uppercase-only,
of course. ASR-33. 110-baud. Round keys. No typeahead.
It took me forever to convince a Linux box to set a serial
port that slow, and then I couldn't convince any of my machines
to accept an uppercase login.)
Somewhere around here I should still have my Epson LX-80, which
did NLQ with only eight pins (three passes per line of text in
NLQ mode).
I also remember a "small" dot-matrix line-printer I used in the
mid-1980s at the Corps of Engineers. I say "small" because it
wasn't as big as the mainframe-oriented chain printers I'd seen,
but the printer itself was about 2/3 the size of one of those
acoustic enclosures we used to put over the daisy-wheel printers.
The print head did not move -- it was a single row of pins that
extended all the way across the page. Something like 600 lines
per minute, I think, but I may have misremembered. Fun to watch,
on those rare occasions when I had a print job big enough to keep
it running long enough to put on a show. Usually my file was
finished printing by the time I stood up from my terminal.
-- Glenn
