9 Jan
2026
9 Jan
'26
2:39 p.m.
On 1/7/26 11:47, Richard via cctalk wrote:
In article
<ab1dea3f-947a-4813-8cad-b57057af2c7d(a)snowmoose.com> you write:
<snip>
C Itoh got into a huge fight with their printers which had copied the
method Printronix used for their shuttle mechanism balance that they
were very wary of doing anything that could be construed as infringement.
The corporate made up a batch of about 1000 clones to start the line and
it was internally called the ANT. The Japan engineering did everything
to their own ends and there wasn't much other than the use of the escape
codes adopted out of the box for the ANT. They wanted some sort of
"smart" protocol, and used the Vt100 and later Ansi codes.
The US division got about 200 of the original run and I got them
adapters for their RS232 ports. The run had used the wrong "sex" DB-25
and marketing thought they'd not sell w/o offering an adapter.
I bought 2000 of them for the guys and shipped them over (Irvine, CA).
When the division was shut down 4 years later they'd shipped 2 of them,
and I got them all back and sold them back to the Taiwan supplier I'd
originally bought them from.
fun stuff.
Later terminals had the right DB25 sex and didn't need the adapters.
Jim
I inherited a C. Itoh CIT-220 with no keyboard.
Is the keyboard model-
or C. Itoh-specific or will other keyboards work with it?
By the time we get to
the VT 220 and clones, it's likely that there's
a microcontroller inside the keyboard that is doing the communication
with the main unit. Typically the communication is 1200 baud serial
bit stream with unknown contents.