24 Feb
1999
24 Feb
'99
4:49 p.m.
At 10:24 PM 2/24/99 -0800, you wrote:
..snip
>The next question is: Anyone know where I
could find the thermal paper for
>this
>thing? I've got a good sized roll of it in the machine, and a spare roll
>still
>in the wrapper, but my guess is that as time goes on, it's only going to
>become
>more and more difficult to find. Anyone know if thermal FAX machine paper
>in
>roll form would work?
I use ordinary fax thermal paper in mine - buy it six rolls at a time
at Costco. Probably prints a little "light" owing to the ligher weight
of the paper from that supplied by TI (I have ONE genuine roll from TI
which I am keeping for posterity...) But the printing is quite readable.
>Happy retrocomputing,
>Rick Bensene
>The Old Calculators Web Pages
>http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7510
Gary
I was feeling nostalgic tonight, so I went out to the
loft in the shop
and dug around and found an old TI Silent 700 portable terminal that I
picked up somewhere along the way.
It needed a little bit of work...the paper-advance stepper had seized
up, but a little TLC there got it happy again, and the solenoid that
pulls the thermal printhead away from the paper when the paper advances
was way out of adjustment. After tinkering with it for a while, I
powered it up, and it seems to work great.
The machine is a "Model 745 Portable" with built-in acoustic coupler
cups at the rear of the machine. It works at 300 or 110 baud.
Wonderful little units. I have two - one with RS232 only connections
and one that has an RJ-11 jack for direct connection. One has a
defected print head - missing one of the dots (I've looked at it under
a microscope and it looks like it was blown explosively - probably a
bad driver - which I haven't fixed.