[Info-vax] DECwriter

[Paul Sture]

In article <MPG.257b2ddbf5d45e3f98968b at news.giganews.com>,
 John Santos <john.santos at post.harvard.edu> wrote:

> In article <00bf4cd1$0$27930$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, 
> jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca says...> 
> > Which model was featured as the log console for the nuclear plant in the
> > documentary ""Chins Syndrome" with jack lemmon and jane fonda ?
> 
> LA36.  The LA120 looked almost the same, but printed much faster.
>

The first dot matrix printers I came across which could do 
bi-directional printing were OEM LA look alikes. IIRC they could also 
work out when multiple LFs were equivalent to a form feed and do one 
instead.

RT-11 V3 brought an interesting twist. In order to detect when a printer 
was stalled, the print spooler would convert single line feeds to a 
space plus CR-LF. This had to be seen to be believed on our LA36 
printers. Not only was printing slowed down by trying to print those 
spaces, but the printers sounded as though they were going to shake 
themselves to death.

I believe this was the first time I modified OS distributed sources to 
revert to the previous behaviour.

> I've heard some of this was based on reality.  During normal startup
> or shutdown events of real nuclear power stations, the printer would
> get so far behind that the operators would do "something" that would
> make the log skip ahead so the could view what was currently happening
> instead of what happened 20 minutes ago.  The article I read didn't
> specify what the "something" was, but my guess was ctrl/O.  (I don't
> know what kind of printers real power reactors used, but the DEC
> printers were extremely popular at the time.  Much faster and more
> reliable than the Teletype ASR33 and 35.)

Probably CTRL-O. In my early PDP days we had a bunch of compilation 
procedures which were written to spool the output to printer. A simple

ASS TT LP

redirected the listings to the screen, and a succession of CTRL-O's sped 
the process up dramatically.

-- 
Paul Sture