how to make use of daisy wheel printer

[Tony Duell]

On Sat, May 29, 2021 at 8:26 AM Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> 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!
)
Agreed, although I'd love an HP9871 for my HP9830, just to see that
mechanism work (it has a pair of DC motors on the main chassis, if
they rotate in the same direction it spins the daisywheel, if they
rotate in opposite directions it moves the carriage. Or maybe the
other way round). I do have the right interface for the HP9830.

Getting back to an earlier message, the 'Apple Plot' program for the
Apple ][ included a high-res graphics screen dump program to the Qume
Sprint 5. It only used the full stop (period) character, moved the
carriage and paper using the proportional spacing commands,  and made
a heck of  racket.

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.

-tony


>
> --Chuck