15 Aug
2014
15 Aug
'14
11:53 p.m.
On Aug 15, 2014, at 3:47 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
Of course, if you go with a DecWriter, some of these
issues go away, but be
careful: some older DecWriters were 20mA too, and the speeds were almost as
slow on many (probably 300 baud, but I don't know much about DecWriters).
Sorry to be so much cold water, but...
DECwriters were quite slow. The ones I used (which I think were actually DECwriter II)
did 300, 150 and 110 baud (there was a push button to select. They did indeed
have EIA and 20mA versions, but the difference was a single board inside which
was easy to swap out for the other part. Even when it wasn’t easy, I worked
with a group of people that used one as their line printer with a fairly simple
transistor translator circuit (since that was a lot cheaper than the correct
board). But no matter how you slice it, 300 baud is slow. We likely wasted
way more time waiting for printouts than we saved for the “free” DECwriter
that we got…
Warner