how to make use of daisy wheel printer

[Chuck Guzis]

On 5/28/21 5:40 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> Some characters that might not otherwise be available could be done with
> over-strike, such as an accent mark (When you apply for a job, do you
> send a RESUME?") or the tilde over N (There is an exit off of 280 that
> is incorrectly labelled "LA CANADA road")  The en~e character is
> recognized as a normal letter in Spanish.
> 
> Although there isn't a LOT of use for it, overstrike with hyphens is
> sometimes used to indicate an informal edit or redaction.
> 
> Some daisy wheel printers, even some models of HiType I, such as
> DTC-300, had micro-spacing.
> Besides PROPORTIONAL spacing, You could print a period, move a TINY
> amount, print another period, and be able to draw or plot. (Or would
> that be PLOD?  And you thought that a Calcomp Plodder was slow!))
> Some daisy wheels had reinfoced period, underline and hyphen to prevent
> premature wear.

I used a Hitype I with 12 bit OEM interface and a 2P+S S100 card back in
the day.   Since every bit of movement was under control of the program
driving the interface, you could do not only PS with bidirectional
"smart" positioning, but also plotting.  I probably have my drivers for
8080 on an 8" disk somewhere.   ISTR after nearly 50 years, that the
movement granularity was about 1/48 of an inch.   The power supply for
that thing was separate and had 3 noisy fans.

After the success of the Diablo Hitype models, other outfits had similar
products.  I think I have one of NEC Spinwriters tucked away somewhere,
which used not a typewheel, but cup-shaped "thimble".  Early one, Qume
was a major competitor of Diablo--no surprise, since a fair number of
the original staff fled Diablo after the Xerox purchase.

Of course, daisywheel technology took over the typewriter market after
the original patents had lapsed.   IBM used them extensively on their
typewriters, as did Brother.  "Fully formed characters" as opposed to
dot-matrix was a big thing back then.

--Chuck