[sebhc] printer driver

Dave Dunfield dave04a at dunfield.com
Tue Feb 22 11:18:07 CST 2005


>Boy isn't that the the truth!!! I built one of those babies when
>they first came out, for use with my Altair, and If I remember
>it used to calculate the printhead temp by monitoring the resistance
>of one of the printhead coils?  That was aggravating, as it would only
>print about a page and a half, before going "over temp", and then would
>print a line or two, and cool for 5 to 10 minutes, before printing the next
>line or two.  Then to top it off, the handshake between it and the Altair
>was not bullet-proof, and the end result was always a useless printout.
>I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I could finally afford a used
>Centronics 701!!  Anybody know if the printhead was ever upgraded?

My first printer (other than a teletype) was also an H-14, which I used
on my Altair, and I do recall the thermal limiting after you had printed
a few lines. I don't think mine waited "5 to 10" minutes, but I do recall
that it would go into mode with a few second delay between each line that
was printed. I also don't recall handshake problems - I did many a printout
on that combination.


By sheer coincience, my H-14 came back to me about a month ago - Gave it to
a guy *many* years ago, and since lost touch - made contact again this year,
and he still had it in his basement - haven't tried to fire it up yet, but
it still looks to be in reasonable shape. One thing that didn't come back
with it is the manual ... anyone have a scan of the H14 manual?


My very first printer was a Teletype Model-28, which I generated baudot data
for by toggleing the interrupt-enable line on my first homebuilt 8080 (didn't
use interrupts in that system) - not thats going a long way back!

Regards,
Dave
-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Collector of vintage computing equipment:
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html


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