Printers used with Altair

From: Rob Kapteyn <kapteynr_at_cboe.com>
Date: Tue Jul 31 09:46:50 2001

The printer that I would have loved to have for the Altair would have been an ASR-33 teletype machine.
That was becasue it was a combined Printer/keyboard/paper tape reader/paper tape punch.
You must remember that the original Altair BASIC was ONLY supplied on paper tape.
ROM cards came later.

There were no fonts or font styles on any popular printer at the time.
That would have been a ridiculous luxury for a computer that needed only 8K of memory to run BASIC.
In fact -- most printers of the day -- including the ASR-33 were UPPER CASE only.

I could not afford an ASR-33 at the time.
At first we had a VDM-1 video display module connected to an old TV set and a surplus keyboard (in a wooden box)attached to a parallel port.
To load Altair BASIC, I got an optical paper tape reader on a parallel port.
Each time we loaded Altair BASIC, we had to manully patch it through the front panel switches to work with the VDM-1.
For hard copy, we later got a surplus Friden Flexowriter from Herbach & Rademan in PA and converted it from Baudot to ASCII.

Hope this gives you a better idea what a "personal computer" really was in 1975.

Does your Altair emulator include VDM-1 emulation ?
This had some really cool extended character sets for drawing character graphics on the screen.
Seeing this emulated (with Altair BASIC) would give me flashback chills :-)

-Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: Cini, Richard [SMTP:RCini_at_congressfinancial.com]
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2001 3:26 PM
To: 'ClassCompList'
Subject: Printers used with Altair

Hello, all:

        Well, I'm bored again and am looking at the Altair emulator code.
There's room for enhancement in the line printer support code to support
control characters of certain printers.

        So, here's the question. If I were a purchaser of an Altair in 1977,
which printer would I have purchased? What control code would it have
interpreted? Were the early printers sophisticated enough to recognize
"bold", "underline" or "italic"?

        Maybe instead of sending the printer output to a text file, I can
create an HTML file on the fly that supports the formatting codes with tags.

Rich
Received on Tue Jul 31 2001 - 09:46:50 BST