Probably the most cost-effective option is gonna be a used daisy-wheel printer with continuous feed paper.
I’d guess that the fastest — if all one wants is a very fast dead-wood terminal — is probably gonna be some kind of line printer. Apparently some of the late-model IBM line printers were made by a company called Printronix, which is still making printers. One of their printers, the P8C20, can apparently print at 2000 lpm. I can’t find any video of one printing, but here’s a video of an older 1500 lpm printer from them with the sound-isolation cover open. Dunno if it’s running at full speed there, though.
Instead of unaliasls to avoid having just ls send ANSI color escape codes to the terminal, he should really have passed the term argument to agetty, like maybe dumb.
EDIT: At 10:22, where he starts typing the login, it looks like the teletype does seek back up to reposition the cursor at “LOGIN:”, so it does support at least some limited escape codes. Maybe something a little smarter than dumb.
Hell, maybe there’s even an existing terminfo/termcap entry for a compatible teletype.
I was watching the thing and got to the part where he said that he was using XON/XOFF flow control and thought that the guy’s Arduino RS-232 ASCII-to-Baudot-encoding thing could be made more efficient if he’d make the encoder use the RS-232 RTS/CTS lines instead of XON/XOFF encoding. Then I realized that he’s converting to 45.5 baud, and that at that speed, even his 9600 baud line — normally the chokepoint for people with modern hardware, you know, 1980s and on or so — is blisteringly fast and inefficiency at that point is irrelevant.
Very relevant…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE
Damn, but we can be so creative!
That is insane!
Shit that beats out connecting my 90s serial equipped typewriter to use as a terminal output.
Probably the most cost-effective option is gonna be a used daisy-wheel printer with continuous feed paper.
I’d guess that the fastest — if all one wants is a very fast dead-wood terminal — is probably gonna be some kind of line printer. Apparently some of the late-model IBM line printers were made by a company called Printronix, which is still making printers. One of their printers, the P8C20, can apparently print at 2000 lpm. I can’t find any video of one printing, but here’s a video of an older 1500 lpm printer from them with the sound-isolation cover open. Dunno if it’s running at full speed there, though.
I agree, and perhaps some deep diving to find an older dot matrix printer? Should be supremely hackable. I only have experience with these:
Next-gen teletypes
They were extremely durable and low maintenance. Also loud and more stress inducing than a modern SMS notification.
Good times
Last I checked, hospitals around my area still use dot matrix printers, mainly because of carbon copy papers…
Instead of
unalias lsto avoid having justlssend ANSI color escape codes to the terminal, he should really have passed thetermargument toagetty, like maybedumb.EDIT: At 10:22, where he starts typing the login, it looks like the teletype does seek back up to reposition the cursor at “LOGIN:”, so it does support at least some limited escape codes. Maybe something a little smarter than
dumb.Hell, maybe there’s even an existing terminfo/termcap entry for a compatible teletype.
glad I watched the whole thing, that is amazing
I was watching the thing and got to the part where he said that he was using XON/XOFF flow control and thought that the guy’s Arduino RS-232 ASCII-to-Baudot-encoding thing could be made more efficient if he’d make the encoder use the RS-232 RTS/CTS lines instead of XON/XOFF encoding. Then I realized that he’s converting to 45.5 baud, and that at that speed, even his 9600 baud line — normally the chokepoint for people with modern hardware, you know, 1980s and on or so — is blisteringly fast and inefficiency at that point is irrelevant.