Semi OT: vintage word processing

On 09/10/2018 12:45 AM, bitrex wrote:
> In junior high, before my family had a "real" computer, I cranked out 
> many a school report on my parent's Panasonic Penwriter word processor. 
> It was like an electronic typewriter with a tiny LCD display for 
> entering text, but instead of a daisy wheel or something it had four 
> color pens controlled by servos and some limited ability to do vector 
> graphics, I remember doing some really nice-looking pie charts and bar 
> graphs with it on bean sprout growth statistics. Way sharper and clearer 
> than modern cheap inkjet printer output.
> 
> <https://imgur.com/a/wPN27Fj>
> 
> I recall it had a PC interface of some type maybe a parallel port, I was 
> thinking today you could probably get it to spit out some really slick 
> schematics if you could figure out how to talk to it appropriately from 
> a PC. Who knows if it would still be possible to find the pen refills 
> for the thing, though.


There's not a lot of info from the time available about this product, 
this article of "Hands On Electronics" from March of 1987 has a review 
of it on page 55.

<https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Hands-On-Electronics/Hands-On-1987-03.pdf>

On page 47 is an interesting article about the US government and ham 
radio operators working to support the heroic Islamic "mujahidin" with 
communications in their fight for freedom against the "Vandal hordes 
from the steppes."

On 09/11/2018 08:46 PM, bitrex wrote:
> On 09/10/2018 12:45 AM, bitrex wrote:
>> In junior high, before my family had a "real" computer, I cranked out 
>> many a school report on my parent's Panasonic Penwriter word 
>> processor. It was like an electronic typewriter with a tiny LCD 
>> display for entering text, but instead of a daisy wheel or something 
>> it had four color pens controlled by servos and some limited ability 
>> to do vector graphics, I remember doing some really nice-looking pie 
>> charts and bar graphs with it on bean sprout growth statistics. Way 
>> sharper and clearer than modern cheap inkjet printer output.
>>
>> <https://imgur.com/a/wPN27Fj>
>>
>> I recall it had a PC interface of some type maybe a parallel port, I 
>> was thinking today you could probably get it to spit out some really 
>> slick schematics if you could figure out how to talk to it 
>> appropriately from a PC. Who knows if it would still be possible to 
>> find the pen refills for the thing, though.
> 
> 
> There's not a lot of info from the time available about this product, 
> this article of "Hands On Electronics" from March of 1987 has a review 
> of it on page 55.
> 
> <https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Hands-On-Electronics/Hands-On-1987-03.pdf> 
> 
> 
> On page 47 is an interesting article about the US government and ham 
> radio operators working to support the heroic Islamic "mujahidin" with 
> communications in their fight for freedom against the "Vandal hordes 
> from the steppes."


The third-to-last paragraph seems to confirm that at least in theory it 
can receive and draw arbitrary figures i.e. "But as a printer, it offers 
a graphic coordinate system and can draw even beyond its graph functions."

It might even accept HPGL-format plotter data, who knows, seems like 
even then it was sort of a de-facto standard.

On 10/09/2018 18:29, Phil Hobbs wrote:
> On 9/10/18 12:48 AM, bitrex wrote:

>> I remember it was kinda mesmerizing to watch it print because unlike a 
>> regular electronic typewriter the paper would jitter in and out in the 
>> carriage as the pens moved side-to-side to draw the text and images...
> 
> I really liked my HP 7475 and 7550 pen plotters.  Made beautiful plots 
> if the pens were newish.  The 7550 had a turret for multiple colours.

They were wonderful things. We had the graph digitising addon too. 
IEEE-488 controller interfaces were our very first commercial products.

-- 
Regards,
Martin Brown

Martin Brown wrote:
> On 10/09/2018 18:29, Phil Hobbs wrote:
>> On 9/10/18 12:48 AM, bitrex wrote:
> 
>>> I remember it was kinda mesmerizing to watch it print because unlike 
>>> a regular electronic typewriter the paper would jitter in and out in 
>>> the carriage as the pens moved side-to-side to draw the text and 
>>> images...
>>
>> I really liked my HP 7475 and 7550 pen plotters.  Made beautiful plots 
>> if the pens were newish.  The 7550 had a turret for multiple colours.
> 
> They were wonderful things. We had the graph digitising addon too. 
> IEEE-488 controller interfaces were our very first commercial products.
> 

They were fun to watch, but I like a file of numerical data and
gnuplot much better. We didn't have that in 1980.

IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.

Jeroen Belleman

>IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.

Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s. 

Cheers

Phil Hobbs 

pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:
>> IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.
> 
> Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s. 

It's clumsy, complicated and slow. I've used it many times
over the years and still do, yet never quite managed to fully
understand it. I even wrote working driver routines for this
silly TMS9914 chip. I never got deeper than just enough to get
the job done.

Jeroen Belleman

On 13/09/2018 15:00, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
> pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:
>>> IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.
>>
>> Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s. 
> 
> It's clumsy, complicated and slow. I've used it many times
> over the years and still do, yet never quite managed to fully
> understand it. I even wrote working driver routines for this
> silly TMS9914 chip. I never got deeper than just enough to get
> the job done.
> 
> Jeroen Belleman

I never got to use the TMS9914 but got on OK with the MC68488.

I very successfully implemented an HP-IB subset using discrete logic 
that was actually great fun to design :>

piglet

On 13/09/2018 14:31, pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:

>> IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.
> 
> Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s.

When it was originally called HPIB before IEEE adopted it.

http://www.hp9845.net/9845/tutorials/hpib/

In its day it was pretty fast and robust when compared to serial RS232 
before much faster Ethernet and token ring topologies came along.

I found the later revisions 488.2 of the standard a bit top heavy. YMMV

In its day it was a reliable fast method of data transfer. HP even put 
their disk drives on it for some of the laboratory micro/mini computers.

Commodore also adopted it for external hard disk interface.

-- 
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 06:31:21 -0700 (PDT), pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:

>>IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.
>
>Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s. 

That may be but it doesn't change the fact that it's terrible.

On 14/09/2018 03:13, krw@notreal.com wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 06:31:21 -0700 (PDT), pcdhobbs@gmail.com wrote:
> 
>>> IEEE-488 is terrible. A typical committee product.
>>
>> Except that it wasn't--it was developed in-house by HP in the '70s.
> 
> That may be but it doesn't change the fact that it's terrible.

At the time it was invented it was really quite good. HP even used it to 
connect their external hard disks. The handshaking meant that you knew 
all devices had seen the commands and data (but also that things ran so 
that the slowest device set the workable transfer speed). ISTR Good for 
1Mbyte/s peak or more realistically on a practical setup 500kbyte/s.

The main alternative for instrumentation was poxy RS232 speeds 9600baud 
=1kbyte/s and the risk of buffer overrun (remember those?).

It is still used in some places there is a lot of GPIB kit still out 
there and the connectors were virtually indestructible (although they 
didn't tolerate metallic swarf or strong acids very well).

-- 
Regards,
Martin Brown