shawn wilson wrote: > Ummm, earlier printers than that didn't have moveable heads like that. There > was this printer that used a chain with a few sets of letters and 80 > hammers. When the right letter moved under the proper hammer, it fired (and > if you asked it to print a row with letters in the 'right' order, the chain > would snap). Point being, a 'head' didn't move to create a space, so that > logic is flawed.
It is hard to argue about the old IBM 1403, a classic line printer. But just the same those types of chain impact printers were pretty expensive and weren't everywhere. My memory is vague on the causality of each since they were created before I was born. :-) But I did routinely use them at the university data center while programming on the Honeywell and Harris machines using the qed editor on printing tractor feed paper terminals. The annoying back and forth head movement of those is what motivated me to learn to type quickly so that I could get the next letter onto the paper before the head retracted, making the just printed character visible. You see the timing of the head motion was really quite annoying and if you typed a little slow then it would bang back and forth and the feedback to the brain was killer. But if you could type the next character before the head retracted then it wasn't so bad. > I also don't think space is printable but whatever. "I and the world happened to have a slight difference of opinion. The world said I was mad, and I said the world was mad. I was outvoted, and here I am." -- Richard Brothers :-) Bob
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