Semi OT: vintage word processing

In junior high, before my family had a "real" computer, I cranked out many a school report on my parent's Panasonic Penwriter word processor. It was like an electronic typewriter with a tiny LCD display for entering text, but instead of a daisy wheel or something it had four color pens controlled by servos and some limited ability to do vector graphics, I remember doing some really nice-looking pie charts and bar graphs with it on bean sprout growth statistics. Way sharper and clearer than modern cheap inkjet printer output.

I recall it had a PC interface of some type maybe a parallel port, I was thinking today you could probably get it to spit out some really slick schematics if you could figure out how to talk to it appropriately from a PC. Who knows if it would still be possible to find the pen refills for the thing, though.

Reply to
bitrex
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I remember it was kinda mesmerizing to watch it print because unlike a regular electronic typewriter the paper would jitter in and out in the carriage as the pens moved side-to-side to draw the text and images...

Reply to
bitrex

I really liked my HP 7475 and 7550 pen plotters. Made beautiful plots if the pens were newish. The 7550 had a turret for multiple colours.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

That was a pen plotter. Pen plotters were heavily used in engineering, drafting, and architecture in their day. They had several problems that made them less popular than inkjet printers, which eventually replaced pen plotters. Pen plotters were slow, expensive, were slow, tended to clog the pens, were slow, were messy to refill the pens, were slow, used felt tip pens that always ran out of ink in the middle of a plot, were slow, and guzzled ink when doing area fills or large drawings. Did I mention that they were slow? They were mostly ok for line drawings, but miserable for anything with shading or area fills.

You can probably buy a pen plotter today, but it will probably be used: I had several small HP pen plotters, but disposed of them long ago.

If you're creative, you can take an XY plotter 2.5 axis (the 0.5 is for pen lift) by one of the Chinese imported desktop CNC routers and convert it into a tolerable pen plotter. However, it will probably be slow.

Back in the 1980's(???), one of my sidelines was maintaining a Xynetics flatbed plotter for my employer: I was called because it took forever for the factory service person to arrive while I was already on site (or nearby). According to the ancient adage "if it moves, it breaks" and the Xynetics plotters certainly had a large number of moving parts.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

They're pretty cheap on eBay but like a lot of HP stuff of that era srs boatanchors. Maybe when I get the new office. I was too young to make use of them much for real work in the era I'm a little annoyed I missed out.

Reply to
bitrex

I found and ordered one of the Panasonics on eBay, $35 including shipping. The pens that come with it are all dried out of course but they seem suspiciously similar in design to the pens from the Atari 1020 plotter sold around the same time, there are instructional vids on how to refill those on YouTube.

God have mercy on my soul etc.

Reply to
bitrex

My first usable wordprocessing printer was a surplus GE Terminet 1200 which replaced a Teletype I had been using for some time.

The Terminet was a "band printer" (similar to a train printer) which features a horizontal band with all printable characters moving across the line at high speed, and a hammer per character position that hits when the character to be printed appears at that position.

The printing speed (and the noise) varies depending on what you are trying to print. It was quite fast for those days. And while it was less noisy than the teletype, it was still preferred to get some coffee downstairs during printing :-)

Reply to
Rob

(see links at bottom of page).

I helped rebuilt two of them for a collector in about 1998. As I vaguely recall, I had to clean off a layer of condensed tobacco smog, machine some replacement rubber tape drive wheel, paint the hi-v supply with alcohol to eliminate arcing, replace the awful tape drive with a DC-2000 QIC-40/80 drive. (11 parts) I used vinyl tubing as in this photo from an HP65 rebuild: The author of the above video used surgical tubing, which I found to be too soft.

Oddly, I didn't have much trouble with the printer that couldn't be fixed with cleaning and grease and new belts. I also replaced some electrolytics that had high ESR but I don't recall which ones. It wasn't too difficult, but it sure burned the hours, mostly for cleaning. My guess(tm) is about 20 hrs mostly cleaning (assuming my memory has recovered).

Looks like $250 to $400.

This video has some comments on interfacing to the serial port for running a plotter (and floppy drives): He uses an IEEE 488 to serial converter.

Warning: Repairing and collecting old HP hardware is addictive.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Commercial storage/light industrial real estate in Providence RI rents at about $4/sq ft I can afford some room, there's not yet enough demand for luxury apartments and condos to convert every old mill into one

Reply to
bitrex

That's annual not monthly, btw.

Reply to
bitrex

t

me

t

my

Nice, here in the Vancouver, BC, Canada area space is around $10CAD/foot/annual...($7.5USD)

Sigh

John :-#(#

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(Please post followups or tech inquiries to the USENET newsgroup) 
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Reply to
John Robertson

As the smallest state in the Union (the entire state is smaller than the Houston metro area) the state government has a fairly straightforward business model which is ding dopey out-of-staters passing through or there for a weekend to party who just do whatever they do in their home state like RI doesn't really exist.

"Hey! Don't you come here and run our red lights like that! Don't you park your car overnight there or run around and smoke your weed on the street! State's rights! This isn't NYC or Connecticut we have laws here, y'know!"

Reply to
bitrex

On the other hand for anything not involving traffic enforcement or flagrant drug use Rhode Island loves people to visit and is pretty relaxed about people coming to party and spend money, you can have open containers on the street everything is open till 3 or 4 AM on weekends and has one of the largest array of stripclubs and small-time casinos of any state in the Northeast, probably. So long as you don't make much trouble the police don't really hassle anyone at all regardless of race.

Unlike Boston with a billion dollar police budget and police all over the place hassling everything that moves and shutting everything down promptly at 1 AM.

Reply to
bitrex

There's not a lot of info from the time available about this product, this article of "Hands On Electronics" from March of 1987 has a review of it on page 55.

On page 47 is an interesting article about the US government and ham radio operators working to support the heroic Islamic "mujahidin" with communications in their fight for freedom against the "Vandal hordes from the steppes."

Reply to
bitrex

The third-to-last paragraph seems to confirm that at least in theory it can receive and draw arbitrary figures i.e. "But as a printer, it offers a graphic coordinate system and can draw even beyond its graph functions."

It might even accept HPGL-format plotter data, who knows, seems like even then it was sort of a de-facto standard.

Reply to
bitrex

They were wonderful things. We had the graph digitising addon too. IEEE-488 controller interfaces were our very first commercial products.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

They were fun to watch, but I like a file of numerical data and gnuplot much better. We didn't have that in 1980.

IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Reply to
pcdhobbs

It's clumsy, complicated and slow. I've used it many times over the years and still do, yet never quite managed to fully understand it. I even wrote working driver routines for this silly TMS9914 chip. I never got deeper than just enough to get the job done.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

I never got to use the TMS9914 but got on OK with the MC68488.

I very successfully implemented an HP-IB subset using discrete logic that was actually great fun to design :>

piglet

Reply to
piglet

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