On 28 May 2009 at 22:50, Billy Pettit wrote:
Surely you remember the CDC 512? It had
English-Hebrew and
English-Arabic print trains. There was a small hardware option to
print right to left. If I remember right, It just decremented the
buffer memory. I know it only took a couple of hours to install and
test.
Yeah, I've pulled shredded ribbon out of those! Loved the smell
when one got all wrapped up in the train. Given that a line was
what, 132 characters long, I'm surprised that they just didn't leave
it to the driver people to reverse the line in software.
As far as printing right to left, a lot of the dot
matrix printers did
this as standard features. At Fujitsu, we did an analysis and found
it did not save any time. In fact it was slower! This was because
the print head return was a fast function, and because most printing
doesn't use a full line (136 characters).
Is the term "logic seeking" what was being used early on to
characterize the process of figuring out how to get the carriage to
move the fastest? I recall an engineer sweating over some algorithm
or the other trying to figure out if the moving the shortest distance
(when using a DC servo) was really the fastest. I don't rememberl
his conclusions, other than there was some sort of "ballistics"
involved. The DC motor with optical encoder was the single most
expensive component in the printer.
The printers had to have this ability for the Japanese
and Chinese
marketplace where a lot of word processing programs still did right to
left. So the feature was always there but we insisted it be disabled
for US sales. There was a disable switch on all the Fujitsu printers
I worked on in the 1980-90's.
I was detailed off onto a little project that never got anywhere that
involved handling Kanji input, display and printing (this was about
1979 or so). Some of the 21(?)-wire printhead stuff from Oki was
amazing. Of course, the Japanese needed it for those multi-stroke
charactters, while the Westerners were pretty happy with 9 wires. it
probably also explains why the Japanese were fairly early with
graphics being standard on their personal computers.
Cheers,
Chuck