[TriLUG] Piece of History

[Tarus Balog]

On Feb 22, 2008, at 6:25 PM, Judy Hallman wrote:

> My first experience with modems was with a teletype, connected to TUCC
> (Triangle University's Computation Center).

Okay, I can't beat that, but I my first printer was a GE TermiNet that  
my Dad picked up for about $300 (he was a GE employee at the time).

The TRS-80 didn't have serial drivers (the $2000 9-pin dot matrix  
printers they sold were parallel only) so I had to write my own in  
assembly (hand coded with a lot of help from Kilobaud Microcomputing  
magazine). The TermiNet was a freaky printer - it had a bank of 118  
little hammers and the type consisted of little metal fingers on a  
rotating band. The character set was represented twice on the band and  
when the proper character came whizzing by the ribbon would pop up and  
the hammer would strike to print the character. It was really nice  
quality and a lot less than a daisywheel printer, although it did  
sound like a Sherman tank was coming down the road when I did print.

-T

_______________________________________________________________________
Tarus Balog, OpenNMS Maintainer             Main:   +1 919 533 0160
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.                     Fax:    +1 503 961 7746
Skype: tarusb                               Direct: +1 919 647 4749
Email: tarus at opennms.org                    URL: http://www.opennms.org
PGP Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481  512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C