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Phil M0OFX
Phil M0OFX • hometown (AP)
TI #Silent700 Model 709 does The Pirates of Penzance. Everyone loves a good acoustic coupler. #GilbertAndSullivan
#silent700 #GilbertandSullivan
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Phil M0OFX
Phil M0OFX • hometown (AP)
Getty says hi at 300 Baud.
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ZXGuesser
ZXGuesser • mastodon (AP)
I just put my headphones on to watch video of a Silent 700... 🤦‍♂️​ Not sure what I was expecting there 😆​
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Phil M0OFX
Phil M0OFX • hometown (AP)
@zxguesser Well that's on you - but I bet you can hear this voice inside your head!
@ZXGuesser
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Boris Kretzinger
Boris Kretzinger • mastodon (AP)
Wow, that's indeed pretty silent. I like it! But somehow, at the same time, something about this feels off 😅
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Phil M0OFX
Phil M0OFX • hometown (AP)
@Datassette_User It's a thermal printer, so it's the definition of silent :)
@Boris Kretzinger
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paulrickards
paulrickards • mastodon (AP)
Ohhh bidirectional printing! And it lives up to its name, so quiet!
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Tvorsk
Tvorsk • mastodon (AP)
... okay wow
So it has some kind of optimization, where if the next line is already complete in buffer, it will print it right to left to save on carriage movement?
Or is this some old school terminal control trickery and a smart listing program which does this?
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Pippin
Pippin friendica
@Tvorsk @Phil M0OFX It's called bidirectional printing, and pretty much every printer of the era did that. (And most only started printing a line once fully buffered, so it was always printing a complete line.) I noticed more optimisations as time went on — for example, older printers printing a line left-to-right, followed by a slightly longer line right-to-left, would print the first line, stop, ootch the print head slightly to the right, then print the second line. Later printers would notice this and just "print" some extra blank space at the end of the first line so the print head could get in position quicker! Dot matrix printing definitely scratches that "satisfying machinery" itch.
@Tvorsk @Phil M0OFX
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Tvorsk
Tvorsk • mastodon (AP)
@pippin Well that's dang cool.
I had my share of Epson and Okidata dot matrix printers to experience but always in "full page" type of operation (with 1-bit pixel graphics even).
So what quite surprised me here to see this type of bidi behavior on a line printer.
(And moreover, this one's being an interactive terminal, isn't it... So how does it handle partial lines?)
@Pippin
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Pippin
Pippin friendica
@Tvorsk @Phil M0OFX Ah, it sounds like you may have had more experience of these printers than I did, then! I've never used a printing terminal. In fact, I think at one point (I was probably about 10 at the time) I tried to get printing terminal behaviour out of my dad's Epson MX-80F/T III dot matrix, but it stubbornly refused to print anything until it had a whole line buffered. 🤷‍♂️ It could certainly print a whole bitmapped page, or plain text using its built-in font. For graphics mode I think most programs would switch it to unidirectional printing, because bi-di caused slight horizontal mis-alignments (stuff printed r-t-l would not quite align with stuff printed l-t-r), which wouldn't be obvious in text mode because individual letters would never span vertical stripes of the print head. If you only saw graphics-mode printing from these that might be why you didn't see bi-directional mode?
@Tvorsk @Phil M0OFX
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