WEB@30: The Register pokes around historical hardware of the WWW Double-u, double-u, double-u. "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," as the great Douglas Adams once said. But for those who fancy eyeballing exhibits from acoustic couplers and coffee-cams to dot-matrix printers and cartoon badgers in the …
A Star LC-10, but no FX-80 ? Goodness me.
Hopefully it doesn't have an acoustic hood so visitors can bask in the full glory of all those pins hitting the paper. Maybe it might even shake itself off the table.
A place I worked in 1991 had a lovely old daisywheel printer. great for doing text only system documents, though we tended to fill it with paper and set it on its way when we went for lunch.
Those were the days of the Qume Sprint 10 - a daisy that ran like a big clacky clickety wobbly foundation-cracking thing. :-)
Not as fast as the huge 132 column band printer we inherited from the council billing department. Even watching the steel band at full speed made you wish for something safer - like an untethered grizzly bear. The noise it made and it's speed were something to behold. One rotation of the type band was three complete character sets ... ASCII art just flew through :-)
Then there was the wide format drum printer - the stainless type drum must have weighed 30Kgs - but was perfectly balanced and whisper quiet so seemed somewhat sedate as it whirred up to speed ... Then the hammers started - an oscillating bar of 44, each servicing three columns of characters, which potentially could smack the page all at the same time so one line per 3 rotations of the drum - that thing just ate paper.
I remember the drum and chain printers the university had when I was a student (just before laser printers took off). For the older generation of them, the control unit was in the mainframe room, in the next building, and a huge bundle of thick wires ran between the buildings; I think it must have been a wire for each of the 132 hammer solenoids, with the driver circuitry at the computer end.
a lovely old daisywheel printer. great for doing text only system documents
In the days when I was an academic one of our brighter postgrads programmed up graphics for the daisy wheel printer, using full stops and the ability to fine position text. Worked wonderfully(*) until fatigue set in, at which point the petal with the full stop would snap off and fly across the room.
(*) But needed ear defenders.
The Diablo daisywheel printer had a self-test sequence that included a test of carriage alignment; it would print an H at one side of the page, then one at the other side, then one next to the first H, one next to the second H, and so on, until they met in the middle. So as it worked its way through that, the distance, and hence the time, the carriage travelled before changing direction became shorter and shorter... being sure to hit the resonant frequency of the table it was standing on at some stage.
Can still recall the SKWERRRK SKWERRRRK of an Epson LX printer doing graphical dot-matrix printering.
Good memories. And had a lot of fun too.
Those days them purdy compootas was more personal. And hands-on, unlike today's Fisher-Price things. *sniff*
Today you can just plug it into power, start it up, give it an username and password for your account, and away you go.
Electrical discharge? You don't know you're born.
I had a small printer/plotter which used a roll of paper slightly narrower than a bog roll and four small ballpoint pens, so when you printed out a program listing it had to write every individual character!
To be honest, it was kind of fascinating to watch it writing stuff out. For a while, at least. Less so if I was printing a long listing!
It was badged as ORIC but I believe it was made by Sharp.
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