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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers)
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: IBM 6670p?
Message-ID: <823@uw-beaver>
Date: Thu, 2-Feb-84 22:37:31 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.823
Posted: Thu Feb  2 22:37:31 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 20:44:45 EST
Sender: root@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 77

From yduJ.HP-LABS@Rand-Relay Thu Feb  2 19:37:22 1984
You *don't* want a 6670 unless you've got an IBM computer to drive it.
We've got one being run by a DEC-20 with an ascii-to-ebcdic translator
in between that also does asynch to bisynch protocol translation.  (This
is a micro that's provided by "Black Box", a company in Boston I think.)
It drops characters all the time, and you can't tell.  If it jams it
just sits there happily waiting for you to clear the jam, and doesn't
tell you.  It jams regularly when printing to both sides of the paper.
Indeed, the paper path is rather baroque...

If someone decides to use it as a copier while you're printing, they get
priority.  If they forget to push the button that says "I'm done copying
now" well tough luck.  It doesn't tell you that it needs someone to push
the button.

Loadable fonts?  Yeah, they gave us some song and dance about that
too...  Don't believe it.  All points addressable?  Not in my
documentation or experience!

Even if you get more fonts, be aware that you may only use 4 fonts per
page and 6 fonts per document.  Italics and bold face are, of course,
different fonts...  And the normal fonts don't include all the ascii
characters, in order to get some wierdies like "}" and "|" you have to
use the "special symbols font", which of course uses up another font
slot in your document or page.  Doesn't seem to be accent grave (`) at
all -- my driver translates ` into ' so as not to print an ugly black
blotch on the page (it does this if you give it a character code that
doesn't exist in the currently selected font).

The font "Essay" is their standard variable pitch font.  It's not bad
looking, and comes with associated bold and italic fonts.  The way to
position things within a line (what?  You wanted to put something
halfway between lines?) is to put "unit spaces" between characters.  A
"unit space" is one fifth of a space.  Each character in the font is a
multiple of one fifth spaces wide.  Justified documents look quite nice,
but you can't use it to print TeX output.  (Getting it to accept
something as a unit space is something else altogether!  We managed to
get control T (octal 24) as our unit space character.  Of course, we are
fighting this Black Box translator thing as well.  Sometimes I think
that was a mistake and we should have just done the gruntwork of the
bisynch protocol in the driver on the 20 instead of trying to save
ourselves work.)

Their special symbols font seems to be a mishmash of math symbols and
line drawing symbols.  We've found the need for some that weren't there
and have wondered why they included some of them.  It is true that you
can make nice boxed-in diagrams with the line drawing characters.
Unfortunately you have to change the inter-line spacing to make the
lines be connected and you're not allowed have more than one interline
spacing on a page.  (Otherwise you might change them within a page to
get more accurate placement of characters, I guess!)

You change things in the middle of the document by giving "OCL
commands", which have a comma as the first character in a line.  (You
guessed it.  If you want a comma at the beginning of a line in your
document you gotta put a space in front of it.)  OCL stands for
Operator's Command Language.  It's pretty ugly, and hard to make it do
what you want.

It has only one font in the landscape mode.  This is an anomaly -- it
has all the ascii characters and is quite useful for "lineprinter
simulation" to get listings of finished programs to be put in binders or
whatever.  Seems to be the only good thing about the machine!

They'll tell you that it runs at 4800 baud; in practice we get about
1200 out of it.

About the only good features are that it holds lots and lots of paper
and can print on both sides when it's in the mood.

Get a Xerox 2700...  Better yet, get a Canon...

						Judy Anderson
						HP-Labs
						yduJ.hp-labs@csnet-relay
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