HX20 (was: Re: Just bought this . . .)

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Thu Dec 10 20:06:58 1998

Once upon a midnight dreary, Max Eskin had spoken clearly:
>> > The HX20 printer is quite interesting. It's got 4 print solenoids/pins
on
>> > a little 'shuttle', spaced 5 characters apart in the same horizontal
>> > line. A motor/scroll cam assembly wobbles this backwards and forwards
>> > across the paper and moves the paper up one dot line for ever complete
>> > movement of the shuttle. The HX20 electronics sends appropriately timed
>> > pulses to the solenoids to put dots on the paper. It is an impact
>> > printer, of course.
>
>May I ask, why do this when it's probably easier to use 9 vertically
>aligned pins like the rest of the civilized dot matrix world? (Except for
>engineering chauvinism, that is)

Portability (size), power requirements, reliability (remember... this was
one of the first; if not the first commercial laptop ever).

The Epson HX-20 is a very small (never held one, but they look to weigh 5-6
pounds)... complete with mini-printer (prolly 20 chrs wide), computer with
a full-sized keyboard, mini-cassette for data/proggie storage, what looked
to be a 20 char by 4 line LCD and in the case I mentioned earlier, a
speech-pak for voice synthesis.

It's quite doubtful Epson could shoehorn an FX-80 printhead & carriage
reliably in that... and if they could, I doubt you could power it for long.

And yes, this all ran on batteries for prolly a very long time (16-20 hours
on 4 AA batteries in the case of the Tandy 200-100 respectively), depending
on use of the peripherals, and I think it used industry standard batteries
as well.

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Thu Dec 10 1998 - 20:06:58 GMT