17 May
1998
17 May
'98
5:07 p.m.
On Sun, 17 May 1998, Tony Duell wrote:
Well, the rig I saw had a solenoid driver box that was professionally
manufactured, presumably by IBM as the old man indicated that IBM
furnished the typewriters as printers. I opened up the driver box and saw
some assembly numbers but nothing that said IBM, so I don't know exactly
who manufactured it.
I would imagine that you'd have to build a box that takes data from the
Mac (or for that matter any computer's) serial port and converts it to the
signals that need to be sent to the box.
Anyone have
any thoughts on how feasible it would be to interface a modern
Mac with a Selectric? I love the print quality of my old Selectric. Using
it as a printer would be pure heaven.
Firstly, most Selectric typewriters were entirely mechanical for the
'data transmission link' from keyboard to typeball, and used the motor as
a source of power only. The Selectrics that were used as printers
normally had solenoids fitted (by IBM) on the selector rails inside.
These were sold by IBM for this purpose (especially as consoles on IBM
mainframes) - I have the CE manual for one somewhere. So the first job is
to find one of those, and design an interface from the Mac (serial port?)
to the solenoids. Secondly, can a Mac handle a printer with a single
fixed font? I normally
think of Macs as being machines with multiple fonts, and having printers
that can print arbitrary patterns (dot matrix/laser printers, for
example). Are there, for example, daisywheel printer drivers for the mac?
I would imagine there would be. Worst case you just send the
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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