[HECnet] Which is THE dec printer?

[John Wilson]

From: <Paul_Koning at Dell.com>

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?

Yes.   I still have mine (LA30P -- no fill characters, but it needs a weird
LC8E interface, and did the LC11 exist too?).   The jamming wasn't as annoying
as the fact that it could *only* take 9 7/8" wide paper (tractors were not
adjustable).   And the timing was very finicky and didn't seem to use feedback
of any kind (so it had no idea when it printed entire characters as one column
of dots after the head had already finished stepping).   But I was still super
impressed that it was so close to useful considering the ancient tech -- it
had a swing-out card-cage full of flip-chips instead of any real brain.
Unspeakably heavy though.

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.

Still too damn heavy!   But yes much better.

The LA120, if I remember right, was the first DEC printing terminal to do
bidirectional printing.

Kick-ass printers (I have two).

The LA180 receive-only printer was, I think, a derivative of the LA36, not
the LA120.

This reminds me of something else but I can't believe I'm drawing a blank on
the name of the company -- who was it that sold a replacement controller
(might have been called something like DS120 or DS180) that turned an LA36
into something faster than an LA120?

John Wilson
D Bit