14 Dec
2020
14 Dec
'20
7:52 a.m.
On 12/14/2020 04:50 AM, jim stephens via cctalk wrote:
However the Microdata Scribe, which was done by an
engineer who later worked on a dot matrix printer for Data
Products and manufactured in Irvine had reverse paper motion.
You could align the paper, set the page size which would
logically fix the printer, and then control the motion
over the page as needed.
It could print anywhere on the 14" platten w/o extra
motion, so it was able to quickly move around the page
doing either graphic printing, line printing which
emulated a plotter, or print characters as needed.
I had a 1970's Honeywell drum printer that was part of a key
to tape / tape to print system.
I think the printer was actually a mainframe product that
was adapted to this purpose.
It had a core memory that held several hundred characters.
The paper feed motor was
run from an analog servo amp, and could be commanded to
index forwards and backwards.
In hardware (no CPU) it had a rudimentary "text editor" so
you could place text from the core buffer anywhere on the
page. Since it had a pretty limited character set on the
drum, I came up with a bunch of overstrike combinations to
approximate the full ASCII special characters. So, for
instance,
< overstruck with ( was the { character. Pascal listings
looked pretty odd, but I could read them.
Jon