[HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

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