28 Jan
2008
28 Jan
'08
5:42 a.m.
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:59:30 -0700
From: Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
I knew a guy that wrote an "alarm" program.
He would be there late
at night working on the LA-36. When he felt sleepy, he would run his
alarm program. It would move the carraige on the LA-36 to column 132 and
wait. At the requested time it would beep several times. If you didn't
press return, it would print a carraige return, bringing the print head to
the left hand margin again. He would sleep with his hand in the printing
area and if the beep didn't wake him up, the print head slamming into his
hand would do it :-).
On that Diablo dot-matrix, it wouldn't just wake him up, it'd
probably send him to the ER with some fractures. I think the
carriage servo was run from either 48 or 24VDC. I've still got a
spare from a Durango printer (same design people). It's basically a
48v Litton Clifton PM DC motor with an attached encoder. I was told
that it cost more than the rest of the mechanicals on the printer
combined.
The other odd thing with the Diablo was that it used several early
Rockwell MPUs (at least more than one). PPS-8 or PPS-4, perhaps?
I remember seeing and using a really oddball printer in the early
70's from Singer-Friden. It used a disc type element oriented
vertically and perpendicular to the paper surface, a leadscrew for
advancing the carriage and a big honking spring for carriage return.
The type element was inked by means of a felt pad (no ribbon) and
tended to leave nice vertical ink stains on the paper when not
printing. Very similar to that used on the Singer-Friden 115x
calculators, but scaled up for 14" tractor-feed paper:
http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden1152.html
When the project shut down, the call came down for the lot to be
scrapped, but a co-worker arranged for one to "disappear" off the
loading dock. I don't know if he ever pressed it into use.
Cheers,
Chuck