Re: Last typewriter factory in the world shuts down

<garabik-news-2005-05@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Michael Benveniste <mhb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I still have a daisy-wheel electronic typewriter in a closet, but I
haven't used it this millenium. It even has a Centronics parallel
interface, but I'd have to check if any of my current computers
still have such a port.

I used such a typewriter as a printer once. It didn't work very
well, since many ASCII characters had been reassigned. If I recall
correctly, the vertical bar was printed as the "1/2" character,
for instance.

I happen to have an USB-> parallel interface. Recently, I used
it several times with my 18 year old EPSON dot matrix printer
(necessity to print something & no other printer in sight). It was
piece of cake to set it up under Debian. I still remember highly
optimized output routines I created many years ago under MSDOS, that
was more difficult...

If it was just an ASCII printer, I wouldn't think any setup would be
required on any computer. Just plug it into the parallel port, and
send ASCII to that port. With parallel, unlike serial, you don't even
have to worry about baud rates or parity.

If you were printing graphics, that's more work. About thirty years
ago, I wrote a driver in 8080 assembler for a dot matrix printer. At
least the printer was well documented, so I knew just what I had to
do. Modern printers and other peripherals typically don't document
their interface. Sometimes they just work, which is nice. But when
they don't work, you might as well toss them in the Dumpster, because
you have no hope of figuring out how to write a driver.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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