Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:24:36 -0500 (EST) From: djg at pdp8.net There is no way that I would want to own and operate a CDC 501 (drum) or 512 (train) printer. Changing the ribbon, even with the provided gloves was a messy job (who knows if ribbons could even be found anymore), and when one of those ribbons got tangled up in the 512 type train, it was an hours-long incredibly messy job digging the bits and pieces out. Inevitably, you'd find that you'd assembled the type train with a character swapped here and there. The old drum printers tended to suffer from the wobbly line syndrome, where characters would be displaced from a straight line in a vertical direction. On the other hand, the train printers, while creating nice straight lines, would often displace characters in a horizontal direction. The former was far more noticeable than the latter. In the mid 70's, my lusted after personal printer was one of aftermarket Teletype model 40(?) band printers. About 300 lpm, I think and basically a tabletop unit, usually sold in an acoustic enclosure. Print quality was pretty good (upper- and lowercase), unless you printed a lot of dumps, whereupon the '0' would get kind of fuzzy after awhile. I still have a copy of the OEM manual for one of these if anyone's interested. I briefly had a Diablo dot-matrix printer--the carriage servo could crush your hand if you were stupid enough to put it in the wrong spot. An incredibly noisy screaming demon of a boat anchor. I got rid of it while I still had my hearing. Cheers, Chuck