A sign of the times

I don't doubt that you're right, and that the 2 printers do have the same prolems, but you couldn't _know_ that from the above. Thr 4023 (at least) consists of the mechanism (stepper motors and printhead), a mains transformer, and the main PCB. Now the mechanism has nothing to do with whether or not it can print graphics, that's determined by the firmware (And amount of avaialle RAM to buffer a line of graphics) on the PCB. So by having a different main PCB, they could easily have added a graphics mode, or deleted some other feature, or... Incindentally, I modified a 4023 once to be an ASCII (rather than Commodore 'PETSCII') printer. Once I'd found the rotuine that translated between a character code and the signals to send to the printhead, it was quite an easy firmware mod (in fact the hard bits were (a) making an adapter to use a normal EPROM in the PCB and (b) realising the power-on routine checksummed the ROM and that I had to fix that too). That printer worked fine on my PERQ for quite a time... -tony