29 Mar
2021
29 Mar
'21
11:14 p.m.
Whatever we had, it was slow. Printed one char at a time. So you got
good and memorizing the code and only asking to see it rarely.
Be funny trying to explain this to my kids. I think they'd get it at
some level but really have no idea how much we worked to not let the
printer do anything.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 02:10:15PM -0700, Erik E. Fair wrote:
Technically, the DEC DECwriter series were dot-matrix
printers, not line printers. They differed from their Teletype predecessors only in
print-head technology, but both printed a single character at a time. Daisywheel printers
were similar.
Line printers are distinguished not by the width of the paper but by the printer having
enough print heads to print an entire line of output at a time. That speed advantage made
them the preferred output device for many-page program listings, as opposed to a
teleprinter terminals which were more suitable for interactive computing.
There were dot-matrix line printers of the late 1970s made by Printronix, which is
apparently still around.
Erik Fair
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Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm