Did any of these portable printing terminals support
lowercase, pipe, and
backslash? I think I'm set with my collection of PT210s, but if I can
find something like I just described...
I have a number of the "briefcase'-sized portable units that have the built-in
acoustic coupler., along with a bunch of spare parts. These were very popular with
real-estate fand insurance folks back in the day, for use in gainin access to large
timeshare systems where their databases ran.
The models that I have (sorry, I can't get to them right now to get the model
number(s0), do print lower case as smaller versions of the uppercase characters. They
don't, however have the vertical bar (pipe) and backslash on the keyboard.
The dual-cassette unit in the Craig's list posting is definitely uncommon. These
were more for use as fixed location (not portable) terminals. The cassette drives acted
like punched paper tape reader/punches, and could capture data coming down the line and
write it to tape, as well as reading data from tape in response to control codes (or
through manual activation) and sending it to the host. I used one of these many years
ago, as a console on a PDP 8/e system. It was really handy. Programs could be stored on
the cassettes as if they were RIM or BIN images, and loaded from the tapes using the
standard RIM or BIN loaders.
I have an excuse to go to Eugene, but don't know if I'll get time to get there
before someone else snaps this up.
Rick Bensene