Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:24:36 -0500 (EST)
From: djg at pdp8.net
> Those old line printers had such a nice impressive sound. At least looking
> back and when you will be doing short printouts on a classic computer.
> When you had to listen to it all day not so good.
There is no way that I would want to own and operate a CDC 501 (drum)
or 512 (train) printer. Changing the ribbon, even with the provided
gloves was a messy job (who knows if ribbons could even be found
anymore), and when one of those ribbons got tangled up in the 512
type train, it was an hours-long incredibly messy job digging the
bits and pieces out. Inevitably, you'd find that you'd assembled the
type train with a character swapped here and there.
The old drum printers tended to suffer from the wobbly line syndrome,
where characters would be displaced from a straight line in a
vertical direction. On the other hand, the train printers, while
creating nice straight lines, would often displace characters in a
horizontal direction. The former was far more noticeable than the
latter.
In the mid 70's, my lusted after personal printer was one of
aftermarket Teletype model 40(?) band printers. About 300 lpm, I
think and basically a tabletop unit, usually sold in an acoustic
enclosure. Print quality was pretty good (upper- and lowercase),
unless you printed a lot of dumps, whereupon the '0' would get kind
of fuzzy after awhile. I still have a copy of the OEM manual for one
of these if anyone's interested.
I briefly had a Diablo dot-matrix printer--the carriage servo could
crush your hand if you were stupid enough to put it in the wrong
spot. An incredibly noisy screaming demon of a boat anchor. I got
rid of it while I still had my hearing.
Cheers,
Chuck
It isn't difficult. But as anyone who knows, you must collect IMPACT printers!
None of this silly laser stuff, or even worse an ink-spitter (they actually
has ones that did!). Me my collection has a few:
An older wide Decwriter (LA120?)
A narrow DecWriter (LA30) that I modified to do upper and lower case.
A nice Centronics 300 LPM band printer.
A couple of Daisy-Wheel printers. Some actually work. The Qumes; I have a
Sprint3/4 (depending upon the boards) with a keyboard, a Sprint 5 (RO). I also
have a couple of Diablo ones that use the metal wheels.
Then there are the OTHER ones:
A couple of Noisy-90's (Silent 700s) of various types (some portable, some
not).
No to be true printer collector, one must have an impact printer somewhere.
Even a teletype would do in a pinch (somewhere I've got an ASR33 stashed).
On topic stuff: I've got some prints of the Qume printers somewhere if anyone
is interested. They are pretty simple to interface. I used a MC6821 PIA and a
few chips. Pretty easy.
Good luck to all
--
Sorry,
No signature at the moment.
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> Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:29:59 -0600
Okay, so who wants a working Diablo Hitype II? Spare wheels and
(probably dried-out) ribbons. Free for pickup, or for the cost of
shipping. RS-232C interface. This is the RO model, not the KSR.
Cheers,
Chuck
Hi,
Does anyone have some Wave Mate Bullet boot disks? I have one of these
computers and I think it works but have no boot disks.
The disks are 5.25" soft sector so all I need is an ImageDisk or TeleDisk
image of your boot disk and not a physical copy.
If your Wave Mate Bullet is using 8" disks those might work too. However,
it would be better if you could attach a 5.25" drive and format and SYSGEN
the disk, copy some CP/M files to it and make an image of it.
The Wave Mate Bullet says "Microcomputer Rev C" on the motherboard.
Much appreciation in advance if anyone could help me out. Thank you!
Andrew Lynch
While we're on the subject, i'd like to collect one
certain type of printer.
one or two examples of one would be nice but, the
problem is finding them and shipping them.
i'm in Michigan usa and all the "good" stuff seems to
be on the other side of the nation or in the UK ;)
oh, the type of printer? belt or chain thier called.
centronics or serial interface.
ever since i saw the belt printer used in the ibm sys
32, i wanted to find a pc compatable one.
do they even show up on ebay?
anyone know of makes/models i should look for?
Bill
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Spotted in the University of Washington's Auction Catalog are 8 Heath
Zenith Terminals. I don't think they are Z100 all in ones as I don't
see any drives. Lot 40.
http://www.washington.edu/admin/surplus/feb2008catalog.html
A Sun pallet including at least 3 SGI O2s and 3 large sun servers. And
a bunch of older stuff. Lot 44
I am not going to make the sale. It is in Seattle Washington, Feb 2.
You can bid online.
Pax
--
Paxton Hoag
Astoria, OR
USA
Hi Folks,
I just got off the phone with a very nice gentlemen from Amersham
who's trying to get an old PC program (on 3.5" media) going on his
modern PC system. He's run into one of the copy-protection schemes
that worked fine under MS-DOS but not under 2K or XP. I suspect that
one of the copy-protection-defeating programs may be just what he
needs.
Any help I can offer will be at a distance of 5000 miles. I was
wondering if anyone on that side of the Atlantic might be willing to
help out.
Drop me a line if you're interested and I'll put you in touch.
Thanks much,
Chuck
All:
I need to clear space in my shop and refocus my projects a bit. So, I?d
like to divest my Tandy 2000. I bought it last year and refurbed it with a
new 20mb hard drive and a second floppy drive. It has the color graphics
board, 640k of RAM, a CM-1 monitor, VM-1 monitor, a few spare parts,
software and books (in various conditions). The case is gleaming white ? the
person I got it from must have kept it in the dark because there?s no
fading/yellowing at all.
I was going to use this for an emulation project but realistically, I?m
not going to get to it.
Contact me off-list if interested. Shipping would be from 11791 (Long
Island, NY) in three or four boxes I?m guessing.
Rich
--
Rich Cini
Collector of Classic Computers
Build Master and lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator
http://www.altair32.comhttp://www.classiccmp.org/cini
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:21:56 -0500
From: Sean Conner <spc at conman.org>
> I came across this bit of code from http://www.hackersdelight.org/ to
> divide by 10:
I think that goes back to my original suggestion of effectively
multiplying by a scaled reciprocal approximation of 0.1. The 6 in
the last computation statement appears to be some sort of rounding
factor.
The problem as stated however, was to calculate x/10 and mod(x,10)
(i.e. the remainder). Dwight seems to have figured this one out at
least for the range of 0..799.
If you/re a PIC programmer, there's a very cool web site that
features a code generator for various problems:
http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist/codegen/index.htm
But double-check the code that's generated; I've occasionally found
some errors.
Cheers,
Chuck