Timeline for How did early laser printers get by with so little memory?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 13, 2021 at 13:53 | comment | added | Jon Custer | In my first 2 years of undergraduate, if you wanted to print out a good (read acceptable) copy of an assignment you had to reserve a night time slot to go to the computer center and use the sole (single, one, ...) SpinWriter in an office area. Had to bring your own paper, ribbon, and type-wheel (whatever those were called - 40 years ago). Not many people bothered, but few had figured out nroff/troff on the mainframe. | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 12:16 | comment | added | Baard Kopperud | Bit OT, but take for example a word-processor like WordPerefect on MS-DOS... It certainly wasn't WYSIWYG! Instead, you had ordinary text (no special font) with things like colour-inversion, coloured text and cloured blocks around text to show where text was bold, slanted or underlined, or where you used another font. First after you'd printed it, you saw how it really looked. | |
| Apr 13, 2021 at 0:27 | comment | added | Mark Ransom | @manassehkatz-Moving2Codidact the software that needed the barcodes wasn't easily modified to download the fonts. And we used the opportunity to introduce other features, including a different barcode symbology. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 23:25 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | By 15 years ago, you could easily get downloadable bar-code fonts. Though in a quick check I found that (a) my printer doesn't come with bar code fonts included (Brother low-end printer) and (b) first search for bar code downloadable fonts not as cheap as I expected. But I have used bar code fonts in the past. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 23:19 | history | edited | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 12, 2021 at 22:55 | comment | added | Mark Ransom | About 15 years ago I worked at a place that used a ROM cartridge font to do barcode printing. One of my tasks was to replace those font sequences with a graphic, because the cartridges and/or printers were becoming impossible to find. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 21:33 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | One time I had a customer who decided to save me some trouble by picking up an additional laser (Brother) and have me hook it up to my medical records system when I was on-site. I hook it up, Windows prints, my software doesn't print! Turns out it was a GDI - for very little more (I think like $20 at the time) they could have gotten the next model up (same speed, paper handling, etc. but with PCL instead of GDI) and everything would have been fine - they wasted more than that on my time hooking up the "wrong" printer. All because they didn't ask me first what printer to get. | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 21:28 | comment | added | Raffzahn | Thanks for mentioning GDI. I did remove that, 'cause I expected my usual comment about how useful it is to fall not well with everyone :)) landscape was done 'left to right' so essentially using a 'horizontal' character buffer. Learned that by doing a font cartridge to fast printing of 64 level gray scale pictures (essentially four font with two sets of 64 character each, giving 8 possible rasterisations per 'pixel' , selected by random to minimize artefacts - so output was strictly a fixed font text :)) | |
| Apr 12, 2021 at 21:17 | history | answered | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |