[TUHS] Remember the ed thread?

[Larry McVoy]

Whatever we had, it was slow.  Printed one char at a time.  So you got 
good and memorizing the code and only asking to see it rarely.

Be funny trying to explain this to my kids.  I think they'd get it at 
some level but really have no idea how much we worked to not let the
printer do anything.

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 02:10:15PM -0700, Erik E. Fair wrote:
> Technically, the DEC DECwriter series were dot-matrix printers, not line printers. They differed from their Teletype predecessors only in print-head technology, but both printed a single character at a time. Daisywheel printers were similar.
> 
> Line printers are distinguished not by the width of the paper but by the printer having enough print heads to print an entire line of output at a time. That speed advantage made them the preferred output device for many-page program listings, as opposed to a teleprinter terminals which were more suitable for interactive computing.
> 
> There were dot-matrix line printers of the late 1970s made by Printronix, which is apparently still around.
> 
> 	Erik Fair

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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm