On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, Ray Stricklin wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, Ward Griffiths and/or Lisa Rogers wrote:
> > Wish I had my old MX-80 with the bootleg Graftrax ROM.
> I'm just curious, but what's special about the MX-80?
>
> I had one for a very long time myself (come to think of it, I don't
> actually remember what happened to it...) that I believe was a 'Graftrax
> Plus', but I don't have any idea what that was all about. It was my
> father's, he bought it for his TRS-80.
Well, there were a few years where the Epson MX-80 was the standard
printer against which all others were compared. This beast of mine
was one of the early models, from before bit-image graphics became
standard issue -- its base character set included the TRS-80 block
graphics characters, actually. My mother-in-law scored a bootleg
copy of the Graftrax ROM upgrade from a coworker at Hughes Aircraft.
That gave the printer the capability to print bit image graphics as
is taken for granted nowadays.
It was slow. It was noisy. It used only tractor paper. Its near-
letter-quality text wasn't even close. And the bastard ran for
year after year. My ex-wife probably still has it.
--
Ward Griffiths
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within
the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." --Claire Wolfe
Received on Fri Jun 13 1997 - 13:28:40 BST