On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 4:11 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
OK. An update Andy looked at the printers that we have. A DEC Writer III seemed the best candidate, but it needs repair beyond our ability to fix.
I haven't fired up any of my wide-carriage printers in a long, long time, probably more than 15 years. It doesn't help the deadline, but the DECwriter III is a fine candidate for overhaul on a repair day. They did break back in the day, but they were very repairable. My other favorite low-end DEC printer is the LA-180. It's parallel but shouldn't be hard to drive from a PC parallel port (even a USB parallel port), but it _might_ take a few inverters on the handshaking or status lines (I don't remember the Dataproducts signals off the top of my head, but there was an ASCII-art file on Usenet for how to hook a lineprinter up to a PC with some 7404s in it). One thing about the DEC mechanisms I wanted to mention given the season - I used to have my LA180 in an unheated basement in the 80s and it did _not_ like printing in cold weather. It would blow motor fuses. Printed just fine above +60F. Did _not_ work below about +50F. If it's too cold for you, it's too cold for the printer.
So it is a bust at VCF museum.
I was looking over the file and this was at the top... # The contents of the "Colossus249" files, in general, are transcribed # from a scanned document obtained from MIT's website, # http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1701.pdf. I'd like to note # that the character-set of the line-printer used must not have completely # agreed with the one the developers had in mind, so I've interpreted various # wacky symbols appearing in the print as follows: # Print Interpretation # ----- -------------- # plus-minus < # lower-case Greek delta > # lower-case Greek nu | (sometimes) # strange lower-case d & # trailing ' : # other still uninterpreted I wonder what the printer was that had delta, vu, and +/- This is apparently what the original from 1968 looked like... http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Colossus249-Martin/ -ethan