Discussion of large systems

[Chuck Guzis]

On 1 Nov 2006 at 23:23, Tony Duell wrote:

> While I would agree that most later impact dot-matrix printers are of 
> little interest to me, there were some very odd machines out there that I 
> find fascinating. The Sanders printers that did up to 8 pases of the 
> printhead to produse very near letter quality output (one of the later 
> ones of those was build on a DIablo 630 chassis, and the output is very 
> much daisywheel quality, for all there's a 7 pin dot matrix head in 
> there). 

Like the printer in this thing:

http://www.sydex.com/durango/durango.html

Since it was pretty much Diablo people working on the printer in this 
box, they knew about the Sanders work and developed their own 
version, complete with downloadable and prop-spacing fonts.  With a 
film ribbon, it's very difficult to tell that a daisywheel didn't do 
the printing.   And you could print very large characters, unlike a 
daisywheel.  This one used a 9 wire printhead, however.

It uses a dedicated 8085 on a Multibus-sized PCB, along with the CRT 
controller.  A second PCB holds all of the printhead drivers on a 
long heat sink, along with the drivers for the carriage motor (a 48v 
Litton DC motor with optical position encoder).

For a time, management considered selling the printer as a stand-
alone unit and even built a prototype.  But Japanese dot matrix 
printers were making great strides and the project was dropped.

I suspect that the Japanese printer makers were pressed to come out 
with a better product because of the need for higher print resolution 
when printing Kanji characters.

Cheers,
Chuck