[COFF] Commodity hardware for paper terminal experience

[Clem Cole]

Sure, cheap 9 or 24-pin dot matrix printers are still sold new, and you can
find them at thrift stores pretty easily.  I'd take something like an
Arduino and add a PC keyboard and dot matrix printer.  You can emulate
something as the limited functionality as an ASR33, but since that is Upper
Case only and technical 10CPS, I recommend either emulating the ASR37 or
the DEC LA120. I've forgotten the specs on the former, but it had some
interesting tricks that programs like nroff(1) know about.   The latter
could print as fast as 120 cps, although it could  talk and buffer the
input data to be printed at much faster speeds and actually did some smart
tricks like printing backward if that was going to be faster
ᐧ

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 2:21 PM Sijmen J. Mulder <ik at sjmulder.nl> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Some time ago I dived into ed and tried programming with it a bit. It
> was an interesting experience but I feel like the scrolling
> visual terminal can't properly emulate the paper terminal. You can't do
> rip out a printout and put it next to you, scribble on it, etc.
>
> I'd like to try replicating the experience more closely but I'm not
> interested in acquiring collector's items or complex mechanical
> hardware. There don't seem to be contemporary equivalents of the TI
> Silent 700 so I've been looking at are standalone printing devices to
> combine with a keyboard. But the best I can find is line printing,
> which is unsuitable for input.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Sijmen
>
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