The Bright Industries BI 1215 was: An Improvement

wrote, in part:

I am now wondering if someone *already did that*. But not on a drum or chain printer.

Some adding machines and tab equipment used a line printer mechanism that was slower than a drum, called a *bar* printer.

And a bar printer which did what the 61-60 did was called an "oscillating-bar printer".

Like the Bright Industries BI 1215.

I was looking through issues of Datamation for 1971 to see if I might see a picture of the Univac 9700. Unless that was the Univac computer in the background in the Western Union ad, I was not successful.

But there were ads for the BI 1215. Noting its unsurpbutted print quality. And its ability to even print in Japanese.

If the bars could "oscillate" halfway to the next bar, they could fill in the blanks for monospaced printing with a bar in every second column.

If they could oscillate almost to the next bar, they could do proportional spacing.

If they could oscillate halfway across the page - they could vastly increase the size of the character set, allowing printing in kanji.

And the ads noted the fonts it had. Bodoni. Century. Futura. Caslon.

When I first saw those ads, I thought they were just referring to monospaced fonts with styling resembling these styles of printer's type. But now I wonder.

Even proportional spacing as crude as the 2, 3, or 4 units of a Varityper - which gave the names of real fonts to some of the fonts it offered - would be amazing and unique. And it would be possible - without the gyrations I've proposed in my idea of proportional spacing from a chain printer.

Of course, since one is starting from a 300 LPI base, it would be slower. But the big selling point of the BI 1215, along with versatility, was unsurpbutted print quality.

I wonder...

John Savard Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download