printer pieces anyone

Printers sure have lost value. I have two panasonic dot matrix printers in the garage. The wide one is likely going into dumpster this afternoon after I remove the stepper motor. I remember paying something like 424.00 for it back when 424.00 was real money.

The 8 1/2" wide version is going to live a while longer since I have a serial interface for it that I've had for about 15 years and never installed. It might find a use or not. Either way, smaller storage footprint.

For the last few years, anything I wanted to print, I send to pdf creator which acts as a print device for me. As long as I can display a document on a screen, it tends to get the job done for me now.

Wes

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 07:13:29 -0400, Wes wrote the following:

I remember Dad printing copies of the chapters of his WWII book (_To Rule the Sky_ by Louis Jaques, Jr and William D. Leet) on the noisy damned dot matrix computer. Later, when I owned them, they were just as bloody noisy, printouts were ugly, paper was a pain, etc. I'm sure glad technology progressed there.

That's more than I paid for my Samsung CLP-600N color laser printer. It was $400, but there was a $200 rebate at the time. Toner refills will cost me half that in a couple years. I figured I could spend twice that in a year doing it with an inkjet. I hate those damned things. One leaked all over my floorboard once, then got me and my shop floor as I removed it. Feh!

My HP 5p is still kickin' 12 years later.

to get the

ICK!

-- Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness. -- Joseph Addison, The Spectator, July 12, 1711

sometimes you need hard copies - like for friends with no computer, or to read and mark up - but yes, printers have certainly lost value - this one was over $800 new. I'd sure like to find a home for some of the parts - the main board has a 68000 processor on it - remember those?

use or not.

which acts as a

tends to get the

Still running 2 old HP4+ units at the insurance office - where they get pretty heavy regular service. Have about 20 Canon Inkjets too - which tend lo last about 3 years. Only buy the ones with separate ink tanks and I refill them for about $4 an ounce, Usually get about 20 refills to a tank before the pads plug up. The printers would basically go forever if the print-heads didn't fail. They are easy enough to replace, but cost as much as a new printer. The current replacement stock is IP4700 units that cost about $129 direct from Canon. Print heads for the old IP4200 are about $119 including shipping. Just took the last IP3000 out of service a month or so ago.

I sure do. What a slow POS. Wanted to be 32 bit, but had only an 8 bit bus. I loved the 68010 and 68030. The ones I programmed were in UNISYS high speed check reader/sorters.

By the way. All the printers I have ever junked out had one or more very nice ground and polished stainless steel rod. Very usable to make metal things!

Paul

I buy the old Canons that take the BC02 cartridge for a buck, provided they have a cartridge. I figure it costs a nickel to fill the cartridge. I then use them for junk printing that will be recycled, such things as score sheets etc. If they don't have a cartridge I don't even offer.

Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Huh? Try a 16-bit bus. I think that the 68008 had the 8-bit bus, but the 68000 was a full 16-bit bus.

How about comparing it to the Intel 8088 used in the original IBM PC about that time? *That* one *was* stuck with an 8-bit bus.

I had a unix based system running on an 8 MHz 68000. While it was slow -- the worst thing about it was the compiler. It produced code as though it were for a PDP-11 instead of a 68000. The only

68000-unique codes which it bothered to use were "LINK" and "ULINK" (for building and destroying stack frames). Otherwise, if the PDP-11 didn't have it, the compiler didn't use it. :-) There were a lot of CISC instructions in the 68000 (and later) which could have speeded up the code significantly.

In particular -- I saw output from the compiler doing access to a two-dimensional array by going through multiple steps to calculate the offset from the base address of the array. Lots of calculations, when you have to take into account the size of the array elements among other things.

The later 68000 family included instructions which would do it all in a single instruction -- base address in one register, size of data elements in the instruction, size of a row in a register or in the instruction, row and column offset in the instruction or in registers, and bingo -- it could read or store in the proper element without all of the extra instructions.

The 68010 had the same bus size as the 68000 -- 16 bits. The

68020 took the bus size to 32 bits, and the 68030 put the floating point hardware math on the chip too.

O.K. My 68000 system was a Cosmos CMS-16/UNX -- built in an Intel Unibus card cage. 8 MHz CPU Clock. It included the memory management chips right beside the CPU. The OS port was by Unisoft.

Later systems which I had which used the 68000 family were:

1) 68010 -- AT&T Unix-PC (AKA 3B1) -- a cute desktop machine with a futureistic style. 10 MHz CPU SysV flavored unix. Rather limited as supplied, but lots of people hacking them to improve them, such as allowing a second disk drive, and allowing both to exceed 67 MB total size (ST-506/MFM style drives). The largest drives which could be connected (based on availability in that interface style) were 190 MB drives by Maxtor and one other brand.

This machine, and the following one, were both significantly faster than the 68000 machine -- which I blame on the poor compiler used on the 68000 system, not the CPU's instruction set.

2) 68010 -- 10 MHz CPU Sun 2/140 (Multibus cage, BSD flavored unix. 3) 68020 -- Several members of the Sun3 family BSD flavored unix

Now -- a Sun system which I did *not* ever have:

68030 -- Sun3x family -- one desktop machine in the same physical format as the Sparc1, and one pedestal server machine.

Indeed so. Ground and polished -- and usually hardened, too.

Enjoy, DoN.

That must have been an upgraded version. I've still got my PS/2-25 sitting around here with the 8086 in it (and Windows 1.04 on floppy).

Jon

Vast majority now are plated steel

How about the 6809E running OS9

Indeed - this deceased IIIp has yielded up a couple of nice (probably metric) rods and a few nice plastic gears and a stepper motor. Still, I'd like the electronics to find a home - there are some parts I could use, but mostly it's not worth saving for use other than as the parts that they were intended to be

Nope! For from being an upgraded version of the 8086, it was a more restricted one. The 8088 was an 8-bit package to make it easier to make systems like CP/M systems which were on the 8080 (and later the Z80), but with the newer instruction set which assumed 16-bit bus, but was made to work on the 8-bit bus for simpler hardware compatibility.

The trailing '6' in 8086 meant "16-bit bus", and the trailing '8' in 8088 meant "8-bit bus".

PS/2 was *not* the first IBM PC by a long ways. The first one was built on the 8088 (the choked 8086), with a hardware limit of an amazingly small amount of memory. The maximum (without playing games with memory on plug-in cards) was something like 64KB on the system board and up to three 64KB plug-in cards for 256 KB.

The original PC came out with only 5-1/4" floppy drives at most

-- or it could work from audio cassette tapes for storage. It was introduced August 12 1981.

The PC-XT had the same 8088 CPU, but had an internal 10MB hard drive and a floppy drive. It was introduced in march 1983.

The PC-AT moved to the Intel 80286 and had more memory and was faster. It was introduced August 1984

For a history of the various machines prior to the PS/2 line, look at:

Sometime a bit after that did the PS/2 come along -- April 2

1987.

Enjoy, DoN.

That ran rings around the IBM-PC. I had a 6809B (2 MHz version) running OS-9 in a SWTP-6809 chassis and loved it. But it was limited to

64K of direct memory -- though various systems (including a later version of Radio Shack's Color Computer) used various hardware tricks to extend the memory significantly -- but each process only got 64K to work with. This required an upgrade to OS-9 level II.

Enjoy, DoN.

I'm still holding onto a couple of Laserwriter II printers of the previous generation (hey, they were over $4000 new!). The most likely reason for 'em to fail is the heater (really just a big light bulb), it isn't hard to replace. Second most likely, however, is the laser scanner motor assembly (pricey if it's even available). The IIIp (p for Postscript) is still a respectable performer.

I do the same. BUT I made up an ink tank that sits on a stand behind the printer and connected it to the cartridge with a chunk of airline tubing. Drill a small hole in the cartridge, install a small fitting (came from an R/C car store) and connect the line. Open the valve and away you go... When the head dies I'll toss in a replacement.