[HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?

[Hans Vlems]

ISTR an LA34, as the console for a PDP-11/40.  
Bidirectional.


Van: Paul_Koning at Dell.com
Verzonden: woensdag 15 januari 2014 19:37
Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?



On Jan 15, 2014, at 1:26 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello!
> Oddly enough the phone company besides having a good interest in
> things DEC related, also made stuff in Dayton.......
> 
> Which model was considered to be a DECwriter? I seem to recall seeing
> one once, and also recall the discussions concerning the thing in a
> certain novel........ (Or other book)

The first device called DECwriter was the LA30, an amazing piece of junk known to jam every few pages. It also came with a really bad keyboard. Was it uppercase only? I don   t remember anymore. It needed fill after the carriage return or it would lose characters (and jam even more often, too). We had one in college for a short while.

Next came the LA36, which was something entirely different. Rock solid, and it didn   t need fill after carriage return. Upper and lower case, of course.

The LA120, if I remember right, was the first DEC printing terminal to do bidirectional printing. It used the T-11 as its microcontroller to make that level of sophistication possible.

The LA180 receive-only printer was, I think, a derivative of the LA36, not the LA120. The 1976 Peripheral handbook seems to support that. Note that there also was an LA35, a receive-only variant of the LA36. The difference is that the LA35 had a serial interface while the LA180 had a parallel (line printer style) interface.

paul