how to connect a DECprinter I (LA180) ?

On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 06:59:28PM +0100, Henk Gooijen wrote: Henk, Something is wrong with your mail settings - you quoted my message on a single smashed-up line. You are quite wlecome. The LA-120 (DECwriter/printer III) is serial, as is the LA-36, and a bunch of other LA-xxx printers. I think the LA-180 might be unique in its naming series to be parallel. Perfect. If you don't have a round cable, you can use a pin-1-to-pin-1 40-pin flat cable. That's what I did for my LPV-11 in 1986. It was much cheaper to buy meters of bulk cable and two IDC ends than to get a "real" cable from a DEC reseller. I seem to recall doing that myself in the late 1980s, under VMS 4.6, but we also had a "real" line printer we hung off of a DMF-32 DC-37 parallel-out port (sorta like the DKC8AA trick with a PDP-8/a). I think we had an LP25 at the end of that cable, or an LP26. Either way, it was a DEC-badged Dataproducts printer that I wasn't able to rescue when the company folded in the early 1990s - too large and way too worn out (I'd been limping it along for over 4 years at that point). ...but I think we did have the LA-180 on the VAX as a backup for when the ribbon feeder or the paper tractors would freak out on our line printer. It probably died 3 or 4 times a year, requiring parts or extended cleaning/tweaking. We ran box after box of paper through that thing. As I said previously, the LA-180 works with PDP-8s, PDP-11s and VAXen, plus with a single-chip interface (a few inverters), it's possible to hook that same printer up to a "modern" machine with a parallel port (Amiga, PC...) -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 28-Dec-2007 at 18:30 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -14.1 F (-25.6 C) Windchill -36.4 F (-38.0 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 11.8 kts Grid 33 Barometer 684.5 mb (10459 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html