Digital thermostat as an alternative to Hive

Maybe they need phones that let them communicate with each other as well ;-)

I remember encountering a batch of £25 new dot matrix printers at that time. They worked ok, but the one & only font was scarcely legible.

Daisies & golfballs were so much better for text. I remember changing ribbo n for red & daisywheel for italic. And working out how to do diagrams on no n-graphic printers. And having to pause every 2 pages to let the overheatin g dot matrix cool off.

NT

The shop which supplied my BBC-B also supplied me with a TV which had been modified to take a video input - by-passing the tuner. That worked reasonably ok (by the standards of that time).

I got hold of a redundant daisy wheel printer from work, and could produce quite good quality printed output. ISTR that connecting it to B's non-standard serial output was a bit of a challenge.

I modified my own tv witha kit that was available at the time

My first printer was a "real" Centronics one.

I got a Panasonic that emulated the RX80, with "near letter quality". I think it might have cost around £200.

What, you mean "mobile" phones?

Ah yes, had forgotten about that... RS423 physical interface. ISTR you could hook most "normal" serial things up with nothing more than a custom lead - but more of a pain than would have been nice.

(Much like trying to get an HP7475 pen plotter talking to a serial port

- the most bizarre interpretation of RS232 handshaking you could imagine)

Probably the equivalent of £700 in today's money... ISTR recall I got a Brother M1009 9 pin dot matrix to start with - not a bad FX compatible, but smaller cheaper and the tractor feed was optional. I think even that was about £130 at the time. Nearly as much as I paid for my first VIC-20

Does anyone actually use a mobile phone for that sort of thing these days? ;-)

In those days you *bought* a printer, rather than getting one (almost) free and paying through the nose for the consumables.

Yup, not only that, ones that can do voice calls or texts...

(although I suppose for the modern generation they could write their ETA on the partners "wall" or whatever ;-)

Yes, the connector was circular rather than a 9 or 25 pin D plug. Might have been 180 degree DIN - can't remember. I don't think there was any handshaking as such - not in hardware at any rate - 'cos I think there were only 3 wires. I think I just had to run at a low enough baud rate for the printer always to be able to keep up. BICBW - it was a long time ago!

I think they must do. I often see people - mainly women - walking down the street apparently talking to themselves!

The BBC had a 5 pin DIN-plug - pin 1 was ground, 2 was CTS (Clear To Send), 3 was TD (Transmit Data), 4 was RD (Receive Data) and 5 RTS (Ready To Send).

Alan

quality".

I had a wide carriage 24 pin Epson. Wasn't bad, can't remember the cost. Also had a Brother daisy wheel typewriter that had a serial input but never got it to work reliably from a computer.

Looks like you still do buy the printer, Epson LQ350 £208 from Currys. Impact printing is still required for multipart stationary. A ribbon is about a fiver.

IIRC you still had to pay through the nose for consumables

tim

or reink the ribbons with printing ink plus meths. But not too many times o r it ends up catching on & ruining the pins. 24 pin machines were much wors e for that, being thinner pins.

NT

Right. So it did have hardware handshaking. I'd forgotten that!

Although IIRC, the RTS/CTS behaved more like DSR and DTR on a more conventional port... but yup they could be used to handshake.