Hi,

lots of interesting stuff on this subject but I have to disagree with Norman (I think) the best terminal EVER was the DEC VT100 closely followed by the wonderful VT220. DEC lost it after that :-( Best ever printer was the DECWriter III. I've seen cars with smaller starter motors than that printer's head motor :-) I currently have (though not used for a couple of years) an HP 2563A line printer, another good piece of kit but not with the same cachet as the DECWriter :-(

I think it was Alan that mentioned solder bridges etc. I realised a couple of years ago that that was why computers are not as much fun as they used to be. When I started you had to know how to use a soldering iron, you had to know that a paperclip was the perfect tool for testing that a dumb terminal's RS232 port was working properly, you had to be able to solder RS232 cables and later centronics cables if they broke. We have lost something over the years because of this lack of understanding - I too remember having to use the CP/M debugger to read the wordstar binary in and edit the binary by hand and then save it back to another floppy just to get the thing to do stuff like print underscores and bold on a printer that wasn't known.

Now, you can't even have a soldering iron without a qualification from the safety inspector and lead in solder - whoa there - toxic material - can't have that - you'll need hard hat, eye protection, fume protection, gloves and a leather apron before you can touch it. We were so poor we couldn't afford evo-stik - we got our highs breathing in resin cored solder fumes :-)

TTFN