On 5/29/21 12:38 AM, Tony Duell wrote: > I have a printer which consists of a Diablo 630 chassis with a dot > matrix head. A Sanders 700. It takes little ROM cartridges for the > fonts (alas no downloadable fonts sor graphics mode) and does up to 8 > passes to produce almost daisywheel quality output. I also have the > older Sanders 12/7 which takes sets of EPROMs for the fonts and is I > think better made, but is otherwise similar to the user. Internally > they are very different, the 12/7 has a single Z80 processor, DMA > channels for data input and printhead output and a state machine to > actually control the printhead. The 700 has the Z80 processor too, but > with a Z8 for data input and another Z8 to fire the printhead.
I had several Diablo emigrees as co-workers in one job I held. One of the things they brought along was a Diablo dot-matrix printer. It used three (!) Rockwell PPS8 MPUs, had a carriage motor that could take your arm off, tractor feed only and was screamingly loud. Interface was Centronics parallel. I've never seen another one, so I can't even comment on the model number, if there was one. This was about 1976 or so. It was used as a backup printer when the Teletype Dataspeed 40 line printer was otherwise occupied. Then there were the multipass NLQ dot matrix setups with downloadable fonts. I still have a couple of those. --Chuck
