[Coco] TRP-100 Thermal Printer

[John Eric]

I think you may be confusing the TP10 with the TRP-100. The TP10 was meant to accompany the MC10 and the combo, I believe was the TRS answer to the Sinclair ZX81 (TS-1000) and the ZX-Printer (TS-2040). It used approx 4" wide paper. It also worked with the regular CoCo. It had a design flaw in that the graphics characters were the inverse of what would be displayed on the CoCo and MC-10. The TRP-100 is a full 8x10-ish printer that could print on thermal paper or use a thermal ribbon to print on plain paper (although, sometimes the print wouldn't stick just right to some papers.) However, the main thing you mentioned is in fact the bane of thermal printing - I folded a piece of thermal paper and put it in my jacket pocket - my body heat darkened the paper to a darker color than the print, so... for all intents and purposes, it was erased. sigh.. but it's still the cheapest method I've found to use for debugging ASM listings. BTW - anyone still sell DMP-105
 ribbons? JEric




________________________________
From: "wdg3rd at comcast.net" <wdg3rd at comcast.net>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2009 11:09:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] TRP-100 Thermal Printer

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_

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