[TUHS] the distinct smell of light machine oil, was Re: TUHS Digest, Vol 33, Issue 7

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2018, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018, 11:56 PM Jim Geist <velocityboy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 10:14 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Which was ...?
>
>> You can supposedly revive dried out ribbons by soaking them in WD40. I’ve
>> heard of it but never tried it.
>
> It works. For the ribbon type printers, it gets the ink moving enough to
> get a second or third use from the cart. Print quality was dicey, but for
> listings to do debugging on a dot matrix printer, quality wasn't the name
> of the game. Just don't use too much...

I don't have much experience with hardcopy terminals, but I did use the
WD-40 trick on dot-matrix printers in the 80s (Commodore MPS 803 was my
first printer).

Only time I used a hard-copy term was at my first job at a university
computer lab, our line printer went down, so, I dragged an LA120 out of
storage and hooked it up to serve as the printer until we could get the
line printer serviced.

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ