One of the big Events at early-80s TSR was when we ran up the new building (201 Sheridan Springs) and then got a largish HP mainframe to go in it. We'd been using an ancient Burroughs computer (for payroll only) and sharing typewriters. The new one included Word Processing (of a limited type). Within a year it also had a very lethal megadungeon (c/o Bruce Nesmith) that many of us played after-hours.

Outside the (holy, refrigerated, sanitized) computer room itself were 2-3 printers; the main one was a dot-matrix "line printer" (printed a whole line in one swipe!) with tractor feed. All the designers & editors fed things to it. There were often dozens of job output piles, with scribbles and headers indicating who's whose.

Some few of us got private "character printers" (one character at a time, vs the line printer) that produced much cleaner output. There was one for the exec area, and eventually all the executive secretaries got 'em (for letters & memos). As Gary's 'right arm' creatively, I had an office in executive country (resented by some), and needed my own printer, one of the earliest.

THUS, certain vintage manuscripts can be found in original dot-matrix lineprinter format (fastest & cheapest), until the character printers took over. Eventually the lineprinter was abandoned as technology moved on.

F

Postscript: The good ol' lineprinter's default was to put the date/time at the top, if not actively suppressed. Thus, some printouts can be dated precisely... tho the time indicated is "job start time" (often spooled thereafter). I still have some printouts from Sept/Oct/Nov 1986, late at night (when the printer wasn't so heavily used), since I printed out copies of a lot of memos & files before I left.

smarmy1 wrote in R Series Pre Publication Modules:Understandably, there are certain topics which you are not at liberty to discuss,

Heh; it's not quite like the "good old days", is it?

but all the rest, we would love to hear.

+1, anyhow.