10 Nov
2016
10 Nov
'16
3:44 p.m.
On 11/10/2016 11:05 AM, Tony Duell wrote:
Strangest thing I have seen on a Diablo 630 chassis. A
Sanders 700.
That's a 7 pin dot matrix printer with the printhead in place of the
daisywheel of the 630. Same carriage/paper feed mechanism. It takes
plug-in ROM cartridges for the fonts, and does 8 passes of the head
for some of them.
It was a rather incestuous community back then. One thing that our
printer designers were well aware of and referred to, were the Sanders
patent applications.
A lot later printers used a stepper for horizontal positioning; we used
a rather expensive DC motor with a precision (etched glass) optical
encoder. We could do NLQ with no more than 3 passes, although the speed
dropped considerably on the denser (downloadable) fonts. It pretty much
mandated a film ribbon to get any degree of sharpness.
--Chuck