Boustrophedonic printer errors?

Chuck Guzis wrote: On the other hand, I suppose one could print English and Arabic in an interlinear fashion, but changing typewheels would drive you nuts. :) --Chuck Surely you remember the CDC 512? It had English-Hebrew and English-Arabic print trains. There was a small hardware option to print right to left. If I remember right, It just decremented the buffer memory. I know it only took a couple of hours to install and test. On the other hand, the few times I worked on them, I had a nightmare understanding if it was printing correctly or not since I couldn't read either language. I used to have a couple of slugs from the trains - wonder if they are still in the garage? As far as printing right to left, a lot of the dot matrix printers did this as standard features. At Fujitsu, we did an analysis and found it did not save any time. In fact it was slower! This was because the print head return was a fast function, and because most printing doesn't use a full line (136 characters). The printers had to have this ability for the Japanese and Chinese marketplace where a lot of word processing programs still did right to left. So the feature was always there but we insisted it be disabled for US sales. There was a disable switch on all the Fujitsu printers I worked on in the 1980-90's. Billy