when was memory "above" the terminal screen invented?

[Jon Elson]

On 12/14/2020 04:50 AM, jim stephens via cctalk wrote:
>
>
>
> However the Microdata Scribe, which was done by an 
> engineer who later worked on a dot matrix printer for Data 
> Products and manufactured in Irvine had reverse paper motion.
>
> You could align the paper, set the page size which would 
> logically fix the printer, and then control the motion 
> over the page as needed.
>
> It could print anywhere on the 14" platten w/o extra 
> motion, so it was able to quickly move around the page 
> doing either graphic printing, line printing which 
> emulated a plotter, or print characters as needed.
>
I had a 1970's Honeywell drum printer that was part of a key 
to tape / tape to print system.
I think the printer was actually a mainframe product that 
was adapted to this purpose.
It had a core memory that held several hundred characters.  
The paper feed motor was
run from an analog servo amp, and could be commanded to 
index forwards and backwards.
In hardware (no CPU) it had a rudimentary "text editor" so 
you could place text from the core buffer anywhere on the 
page.  Since it had a pretty limited character set on the 
drum, I came up with a bunch of overstrike combinations to 
approximate the full ASCII special characters.  So, for 
instance,
< overstruck with ( was the { character.  Pascal listings 
looked pretty odd, but I could read them.

Jon