I third that sentiment! I do keep a working printer for each family of computer (Tandy, Commodore, PC, etc.) I think a printing exhibit / group / room would be worth doing next year. Demonstrate how to print, load paper etc. Can't believe this needs an exhibit to expose people to "what was printing", but these are the times we're in. Bill On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 10:55 AM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Good point Herb. The challenge for the blogging team is that 99.7% of the people who subscribe have never heard the clacking of a line printer or a daisy wheel printer. So they did their best putting it into a modern context.
I participated in the initial review of the blog post and we did a live edit session. Let’s just say that a lot of massaging was needed. But an awesome experience for me.
Rich
http://cini.classiccmp.org/ https://github.com/RichCini
Long Island S100 User’s Group
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________________________________ From: Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2026 10:38:30 AM To: vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> Cc: Herb Johnson <hjohnson@retrotechnology.info> Subject: [vcf-midatlantic] Re: Earliest version of MSDOS recovered
A comment from the blog item caught my eye:
In several cases, the listings represent point‑in‑time working states and hand-written notes, preserved by Tim Paterson himself. Think of them as a printed commit history of a Git repository. They create a timeline of changes ....
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).
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.
Regards Herb Johnson