6 Mar
2013
6 Mar
'13
1:50 p.m.
On 03/05/2013 02:23 PM, geneb wrote:
ing 9-wire printhead. I've only seen (and used) one.
IIRC, the printer used in the HP Topcat calculators (HP91,92,95C,97,97S),
the HP41 priner (HP82143) and HPIL thermal printer (HP82162) used a coarse
leadscrew to move the head, but reversed the motor to move it back again.
The mechanism i nthe Sting (HP10, 19C) calculators and the IR thermal
printer (HP82440?) used the dual-thread leadscrew I mentioned last night
and always turend the motor the same way
The most interesting printer I've seen was an Epson MX-80 (I _think_).
What made it interesting was how it was driven. The print head had a
pin in the bottom of it that followed a spiral groove cut in a spinning
cylinder that went the width of the printer. Very neat to watch. :)
A lot of those types of things were used on narrow cash-register tape
type printers. One side to the other and back again.
There was a printer that was advertised that wrote using a stylus and
even had software to add a bit of randomization to the character
formation to emulate human handwriting. I don't recall the model.
Still, an old drum line printer would be pretty cool to have...
Indeed it would.
I half-seriusly collect printers -- ones with unusual mechansims or
printing methosds. Among them are :
HP7245. This is a thermal plotter/printer. It has a strange printhead
with 22 elements to print dot-matrix characters i nthe normal way and a
13th element to use as a 'pen'in plotting mode. In that mode the paper is
scroleld backand forth, the arriage moves back and forth and it plots vectors
Some odd Cewntronics thing where there's a continuusly driven belt
running across the chassis and a solenoid mechanims on the chrrriage that
crips eitehr the top run or bottom run of the belt to move the carriage
in onde direction or the other
Axiom EX820 II think). a 7 pin spark tpe printer using aluminiumised
paper Also the Raido Shack aluminum paper strip printer
Sanders 12/7 and 700. Sanders made soem interesting 7 pin printers where
the mechanism could move the head and paper precisely enough for _8_
passes fo th ehead to eb worth doing. The 12/7 uses a Sanders mechansim
and is controlled by a Z89 CPU, a souple of Z80 DMA chips and a state
machine. The 700 uses a Diablo 630 mechanism with a dot matrix printhead
on the carriage. It is controled by a Z80 and a pair of Z8s.
DEC LA100. The 9 pin printhead is shifted mechanically by a solenoid
mechanism to give an 18 pin reslution in 2 passes without moving the paper.
Olivetti 'Sparkjet'. This is an odd device. It electrostatically
transfers toner from a little glass-encased rod on the carriage to the
paper. Print-out qulaity is poor, but it is still an interesting object
Vesatec V80. An electrostatic matrix printer. It builts up a charge
image on specially coated ppaer (pased between a set of electrodes) and
then passes pliquid toner over the paper which is attraced to the
charaged parts.
That little Epson mechanism, used in the HX20 and elswhere which has 4
pins in a line on a shuttling carriage. It prints a line of dots,
advances the paper, prints another line of dots and so on.
Is that little Alps 4 pen thing (Radi Shack CGP115, etc) a printer or a
plotter? Anyway I have variosu versions of it.
Of course I ahev a few more normal printers in the collection too.
-tony