how to make use of daisy wheel printer

Chuck Guzis cclist at sydex.com
Sat May 29 02:26:43 CDT 2021


On 5/28/21 11:29 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson via cctalk wrote:
> On 29/05/21 2:40 am, Fred Cisin via cctech wrote:
>> Wordstar had some "drivers" for proportional spacing.
>> I kinda doubt that there are practical Windoze drivers.
> 
> Yes. I seem to recall that Wordstar had fairly sophisticated support for
> printers, though you would probably still have to configure the basic
> Escape sequences unless you're lucky enough to find the set for your
> printer.

CP/M Wordstar 3.3 could do proportional spacing, but it was broken as
released.  For a few bucks, a third party would send patches and
directions for use.  Believe it or not, I still have that stuff.

Wordstar 4.0 for CP/M-80 was much improved; I suspect it was altogether
new code (possibly from New word?).  I have that one also, still in the box.

When MSDOS rolled around, the game for WS changed dramatically.  I think
that it went as far as WS 7 (I think I have an unopened box of that
too).  The problem was that the competition (Word Perfect, then MS Word)
was just so much more capable.

I used Wordstar for a long time, starting with version 0.90.  I briefly
moved sideways to Wordstar 2000.  Not a bad product, but totally unlike
standard WS, and too late to the party--I used it for documentation for
a few years.

I pretty much left the world of daisywheel printers when the first HP
Laserjet broke onto the scene.   Beautiful output--and so much faster
and quieter!

--Chuck


More information about the cctech mailing list