On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 10:38 AM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
In 2026 the blogger felt that a 1980 stack of paper source listings with hand notations, needed an explanation as a kind of non-digital archive. Part of the backstory is about OCRing those listings for an accessible digital archive & distribution. Relative to the recent VCF-East, very few printers were in exhibits, a handful offered in consignment (a DEC LA36 was for sale, fate unknown).
For a long time, VCF MIdwest had a rule for the Free Pile: "No Printers!" They had a lot of smallish dot-matrix printers and low-end inkjet printers abandoned on the pile. A few years ago, it softened to "No Uncool Printers!" In that era, I picked up 1-2 Commodore-badged dot-matrix printers specifically because of their model numbers (one was a 1526, the printer I used at my first job in 1982 - it's not large and it doesn't do PET graphics, but it's great for code listings). In terms of printing at events, teletypes get some exposure, and they should. I've only ever seen a line printer once or twice at VCF, and only a few desktop-sized dot-matrix printers. I can't recall ever seeing a printing console (LA36/LA120/etc) on a minicomputer at any VCF over the past 20 years. For my own exhibits, I have multiple printing consoles, but I don't take a van or panel truck so hauling an LA36-sized device is just not something I can do. I don't even use them at home because of the cost of a box of fanfold paper. I would set one up for ASCII art but not to just chew through half a box of paper to make some noise. But for the 70s and much of the 80s, yes, mini-computers routinely had printing consoles and are part of the total experience. Mid-80s, we had 5-6 LA34, LA36, and LA120 in the warehouse outside the datacenter all chattering away, all day. I still remember the cadence of VMS3 and VMS4 machines when someone was having problems logging in or when the machine would crash - there were times, I'd hear a specific sound, and walk over and check the console for what just happened. We lost that when we moved to a VT100 on top of everything (and saved 4-5 boxes of paper per month).
These remind me how dead paper and paper printing are today for most computerists (that is, everyone not an adult in 1980). In the era, the automation of text-on-paper and desktop (paper) publishing were a revolution; today they are marginal history, a recovery challenge, an explanatory footnote.
Writing large amounts of C and m68k assembler at work in the 80s, the tiny window of 80x24 of a terminal wasn't large enough to get a good view of the code, so we very frequently printed out files on the LP25 line printer and threw them across the conference room table and attacked the listing with multiple colors of highlighters to make sense of what was what. A totally obsolete debugging technique today, but it was the best we had in 1988. When everything switched to cut sheets, it added work to keep the listings in order on and off the big table. -ethan