Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Dave McGuire mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
> On Mar 9, 2010, at 3:20 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>> Curious...
>>
>> Who here has a DECwriter I (LA30)? This is the original early 70s
>> DECwriter made out of Flip Chips. Google for a picture.
>
> ?Not me. :-(
>
>> Who here would like a DECwriter I?
>>
>> No, I am not selling, just curious...
>
> ?Oh, I'd definitely drool over such a device. ?I've typed on no end of LA34s,
LA36s, and LA120s, but never an LA30.
Agreed - I have run miles of paper through the common
models of
teleprinters, but have never seen an LA30 up close.
-ethan
I bunch of years ago, I got an LA30 decwriter that was about to be "discarded".
I got the prints as well, and I added lower case to it. I used the ADM-3A method of
making the lower case characters up one dot to allow for "decenders" (the LA30
uses a 5x7 matrix). I took out the 2513 character generator, and re-wired it for a 2716
EPROM. It is in my "other" garage and works OK. Plugs into dataphone and all
that. I was lucky that there was an extra pin on the character generator board (or I used
the negative supply I don't remember right now).
The real modification I would like to do is add a FIFO chip or some such, as padding each
line with a bunch of NUL characters is a pain.
I guess that connecting it to my SBC6120 would be a good retro thing. Got to get it (the
SBC6120) working!!