[GreenKeys] [External] Re: modified teleprinter

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: Harold Hallikainen [harold at w6iwi.org] -- Sunday, April 3, 2022 11:29 PM

> Thanks for the great history on printer technology! Right now, I really
> like the mechanical simplicity of inkjet. The idea of spewing drops of ink
> by boiling it is pretty amazing. I remember one proposal was to use
> electrostatic deflection of the ink as it flew towards the paper.

That's solidly in Greenkeys land.  The Teletype Inkatronic did exactly that, with an array of nozzles and deflection plates, it could print ASCII text at 9600 baud.  I used one at Bell Labs back in 1972-73.

The first Teletype to run at 9600 baud, on the plus side, but the ink was like ballpoint pen ink, thick and viscous, and it tended to make occasional blobs that didn't dry on the page but instead transferred to your fingers and occasionally clothing.  Sometimes a droplet would stick to one of the deflection plates, and the altered field made it probable that more droplets would stick to that one until the resulting blob either smeared onto the page or blocked the nozzle.

Even in normal operation, the little ink droplets tended to have little tails, so under magnifiction, the dots making up a dot-matrix character each had a little twirly tail running off in a random curve from the droplet.

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu