12 Jun
1997
12 Jun
'97
3:28 p.m.
Y' know, I seems to me that some of these 'sparky' dot matrix
printers used aluminized "thermal" paper. I used to have a stack of
old machine runs on such paper, and I remember certain cheesy
cash-registers using the same kind of paper tape (about 1981 or so .
. .).
jeff
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 16:20:13 -0500
Reply-to: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
From: Isaac Davis <idavis(a)comland.com>
To: "Discussion re-collecting of classic computers"
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Printers
Here's one for the printer books. I had a printer
for my atari 800 that we
order out of the DAK catalog. It used a little cartridge shaped like a
bullet with a contact on the end. The printer would fire a spark and
actually burn the dots onto the paper to make the characters. It was
relatively slow, but considering it had to make about 9 passes to form a row
of characters it did pretty well. I can still remember the burning smell
everytime you would print something out. It was really a neat little
printer, and I can't for the life of me figure out why we got rid of it. I
still have the driver disk for it, but the actual name of the thing escapes
me right now. Wait a minute, it was an Olivetti, but I can't remember the
model. The coolest part was turning the lights off when it was printing and
watching the sparks fly across the paper as it printed. That's a printer I
would like to have again.
Isaac Davis | Don't throw out that old computer,
idavis(a)comland.com | check out the Classic Computer Rescue List -
indavis(a)juno.com | http://www.comland.com/~idavis/classic/classic.html