9 Nov
2020
9 Nov
'20
10:36 a.m.
On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 16:04:16 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 5:58 PM Greg 'groggy'
Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
The Qume printers seemed to have been the best round 1980 when we used
them in our applications. In particular, a large choice of wheels and
fine-grained spacing. I forget how the spacing worked.
My memory is hazy, but I thought that the daisy
wheel printers I knew
(Qume Sprint\5) also had proportional spacing.
I never used that brand. Xerox (which was the main USA supplier as a pure
typewriter to compete with IBM's Selectric 'ball' units) were definitely
fixed width. People started to hack the Xerox units to add access to
serial interface and Xerox made it standard or maybe an option as
somepoint. IIRC it was somebody like Ollivetti that originally did the
daisywheel and Xerox licensed it and they definitely were the primary
player here. But by the late 70s, early 80's, there were a number of
manufacturers of them. But by the late 1970's the serial interface was a
first class part
of the unit, which made them different from IBM Selectrics which did
not have an easy to access serial interface, even though IBM used
the printer mechanism from the Selectric as the guts of the console
for the 360 which I think was called a 2150 but the bits in my brain
on that are extremely stale.
The golfball console for the /360 was much earlier than that, like the
/360 itself. The model numbers I recall were 735, and the newer
generation 2731/2735. The last digit related to the carriage width
(11"/15").
Round the time in question I bought a second-hand 735 machine. It had
an arcane interface that directly talked to the magnets. I built an
interface for it to a parallel port, but it never worked well. Not
the interface: the 735 was second-hand and basically worn out, and it
kept coming out of adjustment. The Qume machines were *so* much
easier to use.
Greg
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