TI Silent 700

From: Gary Oliver <go_at_ao.com>
Date: Thu Feb 25 00:49:50 1999

At 10:24 PM 2/24/99 -0800, you wrote:
>I was feeling nostalgic tonight, so I went out to the loft in the shop
>and dug around and found an old TI Silent 700 portable terminal that I
>picked up somewhere along the way.
>
>It needed a little bit of work...the paper-advance stepper had seized
>up, but a little TLC there got it happy again, and the solenoid that
>pulls the thermal printhead away from the paper when the paper advances
>was way out of adjustment. After tinkering with it for a while, I
>powered it up, and it seems to work great.
>
>The machine is a "Model 745 Portable" with built-in acoustic coupler
>cups at the rear of the machine. It works at 300 or 110 baud.

Wonderful little units. I have two - one with RS232 only connections
and one that has an RJ-11 jack for direct connection. One has a
defected print head - missing one of the dots (I've looked at it under
a microscope and it looks like it was blown explosively - probably a
bad driver - which I haven't fixed.


>
..snip
>
>The next question is: Anyone know where I could find the thermal paper for
>this
>thing? I've got a good sized roll of it in the machine, and a spare roll
>still
>in the wrapper, but my guess is that as time goes on, it's only going to
>become
>more and more difficult to find. Anyone know if thermal FAX machine paper
>in
>roll form would work?

I use ordinary fax thermal paper in mine - buy it six rolls at a time
at Costco. Probably prints a little "light" owing to the ligher weight
of the paper from that supplied by TI (I have ONE genuine roll from TI
which I am keeping for posterity...) But the printing is quite readable.

>
>Happy retrocomputing,
>
>Rick Bensene
>The Old Calculators Web Pages
>http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7510


Gary
Received on Thu Feb 25 1999 - 00:49:50 GMT

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