[Coco] TRP-100 Thermal Printer

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

From: John Eric <jet.pack at ymail.com>
> I've just been using plain old thermal fax paper with mine - 99 cents for three 
> rolls at a local junk store - of couse the ribbon would probably let me use 
> plain paper...

Any printouts you make on thermal paper, if you want to preserve them, remember to make copies with a regular plain-paper copier at your earliest convenience.  Yes, it means you may have to have to cut it into short strips that you have to keep together with paper clips, in the case of output from the TRP-100.  But thermal printouts are transient.  I lost three months work due to leaving a roll of TI-700 output in my car.  In August in Las Vegas.  The background became the foreground darkness.  Stuff that would have advanced AI by 20 years (well, looking at recent progress in AI, maybe 40).  That was back in 1979, but thermal paper technology has not advanced much since then.  (Nor has AI, though Real Stupidity has made great gains, judging by the last several decades of US, European, Asian and every else politics and economics).

Nah, I'm just fooling.  I'd managed a great (at the time) fusion of two of the best bits from David Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games", Eliza and Animals (translated to HP-2000A BASIC [crappy string functions, great array functions], since that's what I had to work with before I got my first TRS-80, a couple of years before the Color Computer).  I should try it again (probably in Python, since that's what I'm learning now, though I'm not dropping the Bourne shell & descendants).  Didn't even bother remembering it during the several years without disk storage, and got busy for a while after anyway.  In fact, mention of thermal paper is what dragged it out of long-term storage covered with long-dead brain cells.  But do back up thermal to plain paper if you want your data to last.
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

I thought about being diplomatic and polite.  Honest, I really did.  But while I was thinking about it, I accidentally bumped the button that puts my mouth on autopilot, because it said, "That's a load of crap, Captain, and you know it".    Jim Butcher, _Small Favor_