What's a "computer console" selectric called?

<snip> <snip> I don't think the Model 735 Selectric could even handle EBCDIC directly. I seem to recall the electrical interface was defined as tilt-and-rotate signal names. My Selectric terminal certainly didn't do any translation by itself from character-codes to solenoid signals, at least not from ASCII. I had to do translation myself before sending to the printer. One way would have been with hardware between the computer and the Selectric, eg- using an eprom to translate each ASCII code into the correct combination of Selectric tilt-and-rotate signals. My lazier way was to simply put a look-up table in my driver code, to intercept each ASCII character enroute to the printer and translate it into the appropriate pattern of solenoid signals first. Imagine if you had to drive a dot-matrix print head with raw pin-driver signals instead of the printer hardware figuring it out for you : same kind of problem. Some vendors did indeed supply an interface that took ASCII from the computer and sent the necessary tilt-and-rotate signals out to the Selectric. Arlen -- Arlen Michaels amichael(a)nortelnetworks.com Nortel Networks, Ottawa, Canada