29 May
2021
29 May
'21
9:21 a.m.
On 5/29/21 12:38 AM, Tony Duell wrote:
I have a printer which consists of a Diablo 630
chassis with a dot
matrix head. A Sanders 700. It takes little ROM cartridges for the
fonts (alas no downloadable fonts sor graphics mode) and does up to 8
passes to produce almost daisywheel quality output. I also have the
older Sanders 12/7 which takes sets of EPROMs for the fonts and is I
think better made, but is otherwise similar to the user. Internally
they are very different, the 12/7 has a single Z80 processor, DMA
channels for data input and printhead output and a state machine to
actually control the printhead. The 700 has the Z80 processor too, but
with a Z8 for data input and another Z8 to fire the printhead.
I had several Diablo emigrees as co-workers in one job I held. One of
the things they brought along was a Diablo dot-matrix printer. It used
three (!) Rockwell PPS8 MPUs, had a carriage motor that could take your
arm off, tractor feed only and was screamingly loud. Interface was
Centronics parallel. I've never seen another one, so I can't even
comment on the model number, if there was one. This was about 1976 or so.
It was used as a backup printer when the Teletype Dataspeed 40 line
printer was otherwise occupied.
Then there were the multipass NLQ dot matrix setups with downloadable
fonts. I still have a couple of those.
--Chuck