Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂
(One of the end goals is to simulate a hardcopy terminal on my old box. I’m waiting for another cable to arrive, I don’t have USB there. And then use ed(1) like it was meant to be used! 😅)
#3lw7tcq
(#3lw7tcq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.
I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)
#nmaw7ta
(#3lw7tcq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅
I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.
Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.
#4qlnpja
(#3lw7tcq) This is why I love tech from that era.
Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.
With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.
Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.
Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.
#apzmoxq