> It shook the table so hard things would fall off.

One of my earliest "computer memories" as a kid was being in a Radio Shack in the early 1980s and seeing a large dot-matrix printer outputting a maze on greenbar paper; the printer sat on a cheap printer cart thing that Radio Shack sold, and as the head moved back and forth, it caused the cart to also "flex and sway" with the movement (again - cheap particle board and screws, bad construction, age - all factored in).

I think the printer was connected to a TRS-80 Model 3 or 4, IIRC.

At the time, I "owned" (parents purchased - and I still have it) a TRS-80 Color Computer 2; which is probably why I was in the store with my Dad, probably buying something for it. It was my first "real computer" (my first "computer" - and introduction to programming - was the controller of the Milton Bradley Big Trak; I still have it, too).

OK, nostalgia time. Growing up behind the iron curtain, my access to electronics was limited. I did own a ZX Spectrum in the early eighties but a printer was out of reach. So I hooked up a russian-built teletype machine to it through a homebrew serial interface. My "printer driver" controlled one bit of a Z80 PIO, and baud rate timing was done by instruction cycle counting. The machine had cyrillic and latin characters but some ASCII special symbols where missing. I fondly remember filing down the peripheral parts of the cyrillic "sh" character (Ж) type to obtain something quite similar to an asterisk. The noise this thing made can only be compared to a jackhammer, but it worked.

This was a spectacular read. Thank you for sharing!! :)

Well I also attempted building a punched card reader (interfaced to the same PIO) as the university I studied at had a mainframe with punchcards and I had written some Pascal code there which I would have loved to transfer to the Speccy. Unfortunately I never got it to work reliably - probably the DC brush motor I used for transporting the cards produced just too incoherent movement, or perhaps the photo diodes caught too much ambient 50Hz noise from flourescent lights. Anyway I gave up, re-typed my most important Pascal programs and compensated my frustration by extending Hisoft Pascal, which just displayed numeric error codes on the ZX Spectrum, with actual on-screen text messages. Ha!

They would also disturb the acoustically coupled modems - I recall having to sit an acoustic coupler on a thick piece of foam.