how to make use of daisy wheel printer

[Chuck Guzis]

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