One of the most interesting aspects of mucking about with old IT is the insight it gives into earlier developers’ thinking and motivations. Case in point: how paragraph styling works in Psion Word 3, which shipped with the Series 3 palmtops.
Reader Daniel Boira recently asked me if I’d experimented with printing large characters on the SparkFun thermal printer (see Hacking a Thermal Till Printer…) that I’d rigged up to my Raspberry Pi’s GPIO. I hadn’t done so, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Sinclair’s ZX Printer. Yes it was slow and the print was poorly rendered on its special aluminium-coated paper, which picked up greasy fingerprints like they were going out of fashion, but it was cute, compact and cheap.
