[ale] Need Tractor Feed Dot Matrix printer

[Jeff Hubbs]

On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 10:13 -0400, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> On Friday 27 May 2005 09:02 am, Mark Wright wrote:
> | I think anyone that used or owned an XT should qualify.
> 
> What about those of us who owned the early 8-bit Ataris,
> Commodores and Amigas, all of which pre-dated the first
> Apples? The only programming language for these antiques
> was Basic, in one flavor or another.

No, no, no!  The language of choice for the Amiga was C, although BASIC
came standard.  Also, the Amiga post-dated the Mac.  

Okay, posting this means that I'll have to haul out my graybeard cred.

First computer utilized was a Data General Nova 2 with I think 3 or 4
teletypes and 2 CRT terminals.  That was at my high school (McCallie in
Chattanooga).  It was later replaced with a Nova 3.  Two disk drives,
one with a removable pack, one fixed.  I spent about three years coming
up with BASIC programs for that thing, but once I had written a storage
and execution program for TI calculator programs, and modified an old
graphing program to use a new dot-matrix printer's dot-addressable
graphics capability, I started to get a bit burnt out on it.  

College had me dealing with a Timex Sinclair (mostly used as a terminal
w/ modem), CDC Cyber mainframes, and an IBM PC Portable borrowed from my
girlfriend (again, mostly used as a terminal).  

Professionally, I started off working with DEC VAX/VMS and VAX/SEVMS for
about six years solid and got into MS-DOS PCs and Banyan VINES very
heavily (Amiga at home, mostly used for MIDI, sound, and terminal
emulation).  Most of my programming work was done in Pascal and I came
up with some novel techniques in ATLAS, a language used at the time for
automated electronic test equipment.  The ATLAS work was done on an
HP1000.

Jeff