Where did you start with Micro controllers?

Printronix rings a bell. I think you are right, they had a line of dots which buzzed away as the paper passed them.

As far as I have seen (and this was a little while back) they1 have very fast laser printers. There was also a technology, whose brand name eludes me2, where they put toner on the page but just used very high pressure to fuse it to the page. (Looks like the technology is called Ionography).

  1. High-speed production houses, like banks, insurance companies.

  2. Miltope, maybe.


Also I believe they print "packing information" onto the side of each page of the letter (look at the bar code on the edge of a recent statement). This tells the envelope-insertion equipment how many pages go into one envelope (eg. for a multi-page bank statement).

Printronix did make one the earliest 'dot matrix' printers in 132 column version. Dec also made an early 132 column dot matrix for their minicomputer systems, the famous LA-36 printer. Later Epson used the same method for small printers for the early microcomputer systems, followed by many that made dot matrix printers the first popular affordable printers for home PCs. They sure made a piercing sound and I soon learned to hate dot matrix printers because of that.

Lefty

I suspect whatever tech the newspapers are using these days to print their papers is what is state of the art in high speed printing. I suspect the days of setting lead type is long gone. smiley-wink

last I looked (and this was 10 years ago) they were etching large sheets, wrapping them on a drum and running the presses from that using an offset process (ink on plate transfers to big rubber drum which mashes the image on paper)

Osgeld:

I suspect whatever tech the newspapers are using these days to print their papers is what is state of the art in high speed printing. I suspect the days of setting lead type is long gone. smiley-wink

last I looked (and this was 10 years ago) they were etching large sheets, wrapping them on a drum and running the presses from that using an offset process (ink on plate transfers to big rubber drum which mashes the image on paper)

This looks like a pretty hi-tec printer: http://www.biz.konicaminolta.com/production/c7000_c6000/index.html

Lefty

Printronix did make one the earliest 'dot matrix' printers in 132 column version. Dec also made an early 132 column dot matrix for their minicomputer systems, the famous LA-36 printer.

The Printronix I'm thinking of was a high-speed lineprinter replacement with an entire row (?) of dots.
The LA36 was a terminal (keyboard/etc), ran at 30cps, and had the more typical arrangement with a single column of dots on a moving printhead...

LA36 Engineering manual: PDP-8 Document Search Results

westfw:

Printronix did make one the earliest 'dot matrix' printers in 132 column version. Dec also made an early 132 column dot matrix for their minicomputer systems, the famous LA-36 printer.

The Printronix I'm thinking of was a high-speed lineprinter replacement with an entire row (?) of dots.
The LA36 was a terminal (keyboard/etc), ran at 30cps, and had the more typical arrangement with a single column of dots on a moving printhead...

LA36 Engineering manual: PDP-8 Document Search Results

Here is the picture of the Printronix I worked on a little, but don't recall the exact hammer arrangement, seem to recall something spinning pretty fast inside, but then again there were so many different printers back at the time.

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=printronix&hl=en&sa=X&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS373US373&biw=1055&bih=720&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=eq-_kQsJQQiOPM:&imgrefurl=http://www.fib.upc.edu/retroinformatica/exposicio/ordinadors/Printronix-P600.html%3Flang%3Dca&docid=-GQooXnZlvA-7M&imgurl=http://www.fib.upc.edu/retroinformatica/exposicio/ordinadors/Printronix-P600/mainColumnParagraphs/0/image/IMG_2158%252520(Custom).JPG&w=620&h=827&ei=7dI5T_rTIYOZiQKqmZSTDA&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=63&sig=108332181031703398911&page=3&tbnh=167&tbnw=119&start=35&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:35&tx=52&ty=70

retrolefty:
This looks like a pretty hi-tec printer: http://www.biz.konicaminolta.com/production/c7000_c6000/index.html

Lefty

maybe, reminds me of just a couple months ago I was working a seasonal temp job at a lab that did most of the school portraits in the country, they had a very large room with similar style printers (not that I have an exact count but off of memory 10 of them) which used laser + chemical processes to print on light sensitive photographic paper.

We also had a couple very large format inkjet plotters to print on canvas, massive nasty looking old school photo drum printer things that could turn out a 1 foot tall stack of color photos in a matter of seconds, and their newest machines some HP indigo presses, which in a nutshell were 7 foot tall color plastic film printers.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hp+indigo&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=r9Q5T9uPG46ctwfm__3dCg&biw=1280&bih=920&sei=sdQ5T9zwNcKItwfagsj3Cg

A 4040 processor, with a whopping 1024 'bits' of static RAM. Machine language of course. Ended up building the interface to print to a KSR-15 TTY printer, mmmm.
Sad part, I still have some of that crap out in the barn.

In 1966 the company I worked( aerospace ) designed a package with a Rolm computer.The Rolm was a militarized Data General. I worked in the Calibration Lab and was sent to a school to learn to maintain the beasts. They had 4K of core memory and you load a bootstrap loader by hand and then loaded a tape with the system from the tape reader on a teletype. In class they would start the load and give a lecture while the teletype clunked on and on.

Jim

Thread revival! I guess I never answered the original question...
I started out on Mainframes, DEC-10s, DEC-20s, and big iron IBM (summer job during college.) I lusted after various microcomputers, starting with the Altair 8080 and SWTP 6800, with more significant interest in Cosmic Elf 1802 and 8085. Later the PIC came out and was even more interesting, plus AVRs and etc. But it was really difficult to get very motivated to actually do much with them when I had entire ARPANet-connected mainframes to play with...

Eventually the DEC mainframes were dying and I moved (professionally) to high-end microcontrollers like 68000, x86, MIPS, and PPC, where the hardware/micro background was useful for low level infrastructure and driver work. I still seem to enjoy infrastructure development more than actual projects...

n 1966 the company I worked( aerospace ) designed a package with a Rolm computer.The Rolm was a militarized Data General

Rolm was founded after DG, and DG only started up in about 1968. Or so I thought.

I started out with the Z80 and in 1978. First machine was a TRS-80 Mod 1 Level 2 BASIC with 4K RAM. Did an upgrade to 16K for $40. Played around with a number of CPM machines and more recently with a couple of microcontrollers. Arduino is by far, the easiest to get started with and has a good IDE that works better than many you have to pay for.

Printers - Seems like DEC had a highspeed Dot Matrix that had like 4 print heads. All tied together on the same carriage so they moved together. That would be like 33 collumns for each printhead.

Tore apart one of those old drum printers. That bronze print drum weighed like 5 pounds. Had small driver boards, 1 for each printhead. Paper would FLY through those machines.

Tore apart one of those old drum printers. That bronze print drum weighed like 5 pounds. Had small driver boards, 1 for each printhead. Paper would FLY through those machines.

Yep, the top of the line drum printers would spit out 1200 lines a min or faster of paper movement. This often created a static electricity problem with the paper moving through the printer so fast that special grounding brushes were needed to bleed off the charge on the paper. Also aliment of 132 print hammers so that the printed characters were perfectly flat across the line was a very laborious and time consuming maintenance task, I hated having to perform that check and adjustment. The testing involved firing all 132 hammers at the same time and using a scope to measure the counter EMF pulse from each hammer relative to the first hammer and mechanically adjusting each hammer to match the reference hammer. The lights would dim each time all the hammers fired at the same time and the noise level was deafening.

Lefty

now that's a printer!

Yep, you went through a box of paper every few minutes. The trick with doing large reports was not losing a page or two as you changed boxes.

I remember too that you sometimes printed carbon copies, the paper actually had the carbon-paper sandwiched between two layers, to you could get two identical copies in the one run. Then there was a gadget that separated the layers and the carbon paper.

My first job in aerospace was designing a SRAM card to use in place of UVEPROM so the software guys could download code and not have to keep burning/erasing UVEPROM boards. Whopping 320K bytes. 2nd task was updating that to 768Kbytes and adding 32K of EEPROM.
Also ran on a 20 address-bit ROLM bus with 2910 bit slice processor, 110nS cycle times to receive the address and the read/write control, decode if it was for the card, and have data back out on the bus. Had 4 or 5 memory cards in the system, plus other cards that responded on the same bus. 21st address bit added later on.
Eventually all the memory was pulled back into a single processor card with an intel processor.

Z80 and 6802/9, early 80s.

designing a SRAM card to use in place of UVEPROM so the software guys could download code and not have to keep burning/erasing UVEPROM boards.

I designed a Z8-based EPROM emulator but only 32k IIRC, large enough for most embedded work, had it on the market for some time.


Rob

My first start with electronics was with a 150-in-ONE project kit at aged 11. I have vivid memories of wiring up a crystal radio and tuning into my first AM station (in Jakarta) which was playing the (then) newly released smash hit number one: Eye of the Tiger by Survivor...

As I grew up in Australia, I went through the entire catalog of Dick Smith Electronics (DSE) Funway into Electronics kits, building almost all of them that I could afford with my allowance and any money I earned delivering junk mail and working at a shoe shop on Saturday mornings.

In my mid teens I watched in awe as my best friend built a Z80 based Ferguson Big Board computer. I, however, got hooked on the software side of things and spent my late teens writing serial (mostly FOSSIL based) communications utilities to interface bespoke POS systems to Gilbarco petrol pumps; linking NEC PBX systems to Qantel hotel billing systems for CDR processing. I also wrote a tennis school database and a hotel functions event management database while studying at University and working as a night porter/auditor trainee in a hotel. Fun times!

Between 18 and 20 as I studied computer systems engineering, a wonderful course that covered everything from basic programming to operating systems to electronic peripheral design - in one class, I build a wire-wrap ISA bus AD/DA card for an 8086 based PC and wrote a DOS TSR sound driver in assembly language; and a Telix clone in Pascal - those were the days! In my 20s I helped my wife with her CompSci studies, in particular with MicMac assignments.

I then spent 20 years working in the Internet and Telecommunications industry as an R&D engineer, designing and building networks and associated peripherals where I designed a system using Z80 based Rabbit (now owned by Digi) microcontrollers for out of band monitoring of remotely deployed microwave systems. I am now a consulting engineer specialising in next gen IP telephony living and working in Europe.

My most recent return to micro controllers has been with an Arduino Uno and Arduino Fio which I am using to build my vision impaired nephew a talking temperature guage with scrolling LED text display. The experience has been fantastic! Mixing the best parts of writing code, soldering small circuits and wiring up different gadgets to talk to each other - heaven!

Cheers

Leigh

I remember those Big Boards, what monsters.

I just found the eZ80 (Zilog eZ80 - Wikipedia), what a great-looking chip. I'm reading the data sheet now wondering what I could use one for.

I grew up in Australia

And now you're in the UK, one can only imagine the terrible circumstances that brought that about :slight_smile:


Rob

G'day Rob,

Graynomad:
I remember those Big Boards, what monsters.

Indeed - I don't ever recall my mate ever doing much with it other than zap a few eeproms with the on board programmer (for what, I have no idea!) :slight_smile:

I just found the eZ80 (Zilog eZ80 - Wikipedia), what a great-looking chip. I'm reading the data sheet now wondering what I could use one for.

I remember enjoying the Z80 - Zilog need to find a way to get them out to the mass market / enthusiasts like they did through education in the 70s and 80s if they hope to stand a chance against the current generation of AVRs.

I grew up in Australia

And now you're in the UK, one can only imagine the terrible circumstances that brought that about :slight_smile:

It's a long story mate :slight_smile: Belfast is an interesting spot, too right.

Cheers

Leigh