I second the OSI nomination. A couple of years ago, one of those machines sold on ebay. I was struck by the look of the machine. It was a tan/brown metal chasis, similar to a C1P but with a bigger back end. It also looked like it had the same keyboard layout. I had never seen any other machine that used the OSI keyboard layout. I intended to bid on the lot but forgot. I emailed the winner, asking him if he would let me know if it was, in fact, OSI hardware. He replied, saying that he would when he received the unit, but never did. Bill

Princeton university released a famous set of pictures done on impact printers with fixed character sets, such as chain or drum type printers. They had a 256 bit grey scale that was transated to a 6 character overlay for each "pixel". In the actual data, one would transmit a line of information for each raster line in the picture, with the appropriate character for each pixel in the raster, and have 6 lines of data to be overprinted for each line or raster. The princeton set I have had 2 or three sections that all had to be printed, trimmed and fitted together. The Einstein, and spock, and nude photos were very good. I reproduced them on a 1403 on a 360/50 (MVT 21) in college using direct printing, since the tapes I have had fortran carriage control (first column + or space to indicate overstrikes, etc). you could just send it to a 1403, which hardware actually accepted this (or at least the 360 print controller did) and didn't have to code a thing. Later I ran it on Dataproducts 2230's and 2260's and had identical results. All used the back side of 11 x 14 greenbar or similar, and were about 4' tall by 3' wide in dimension. The dot matrix printers can do something that the impact printers cant, and that is dithering. besides just assigning a value to each pixel, dithering recognizes that areas of light and dark exist on a picture, and that pixels are not ideal 0 dimension points, but have area. Dithering is an analysis to cause the colors and shade of pixels to "lean" to the direction of concentrations that exist in areas of an image, and smooth over transistions or aliasing at the same time. I saw this in some dot matrix programs that ran on Printronix p-300's, but again, they did not have imaging, only printing either datasets (like early jpegs or whatever). I never had access to scanners or cameras to play with though i'd love to have. Most of the newer stuff that I saw used a dye transfer process type printer to go from video feed directly onto paper, such as the sony mavica printers which went with their video still cameras. Canon and epson had video still to paper devices that would do that as well. I saw the images transfered via thermal from the paper to specially prepared coffee mugs (the ones that didn't smear) though a white glaze mug would take an image off most of those papers. It just would smear if rubbed or washed. One mug I bought at one time with the treatment had something that absorbed the dye when the heating went on, and you could actually supposedly wash it, and it seemed pretty much rub proof, though I've never pushed it to actually mess up the image (it is now an heirloom, given it has a photo of my dad on it). Jim