[vcf-midatlantic] Greenbar print

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 4:11 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic
<vcf-midatlantic at 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