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A line starve describes the feeding of paper in a line printer back one line or moving the cursor on a character terminal up one line. It is the opposite of a line feed. Most printers do not support this operation. This term is also used to describe the control character or escape sequence which causes this action. This is not a standard ASCII character, but it is defined as the ISO 6429 and Unicode "Reverse Line Feed" C1 control code (U+008D).
ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of technical limitations of computer systems at the time it was invented, ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limited its scope. Many computer systems instead use Unicode, which has millions of code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as the ASCII set.
In computing, a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a persistent representation of graphics or text, usually on paper. While most output is human-readable, bar code printers are an example of an expanded use for printers. Different types of printers include 3D printers, inkjet printers, laser printers, and thermal printers.
In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point in a character set that does not represent a written character or symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the addition of a symbol to the text. All other characters are mainly graphic characters, also known as printing characters, except perhaps for "space" characters. In the ASCII standard there are 33 control characters, such as code 7, BEL, which rings a terminal bell.
A teleprinter is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initially they were used in telegraphy, which developed in the late 1830s and 1840s as the first use of electrical engineering, though teleprinters were not used for telegraphy until 1887 at the earliest. The machines were adapted to provide a user interface to early mainframe computers and minicomputers, sending typed data to the computer and printing the response. Some models could also be used to create punched tape for data storage and to read back such tape for local printing or transmission.
In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters. Generally, the judgement of whether something is an escape character or not depends on the context.
A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were impact printers.
A dot matrix is a 2-dimensional patterned array, used to represent characters, symbols and images. Most types of modern technology use dot matrices for display of information, including mobile phones, televisions, and printers. The system is also used in textiles with sewing, knitting and weaving.
Daisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to three times faster. Daisy wheel printing was used in electronic typewriters, word processors and computers from 1972. The daisy wheel is so named because of its resemblance to the daisy flower.
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once, as opposed to serial communication, in which bits are sent one at a time. To do this, parallel ports require multiple data lines in their cables and port connectors and tend to be larger than contemporary serial ports, which only require one data line.
A carriage return, sometimes known as a cartridge return and often shortened to CR, <CR> or return, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. It is closely associated with the line feed and newline concepts, although it can be considered separately in its own right.
Newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a sequence of characters, is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
The ATASCII character set, from ATARI Standard Code for Information Interchange, alternatively ATARI ASCII, is the variation on ASCII used in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. The first of this family are the Atari 400 and 800, released in 1979, and later models were released throughout the 1980s. The last computer to use the ATASCII character set is the Atari XEGS which was released in 1987 and discontinued in 1992. The Atari ST family of computers use the different Atari ST character set.
The IBM 1403 line printer was introduced as part of the IBM 1401 computer in 1959 and had an especially long life in the IBM product line.
A page break is a marker in an electronic document that tells the document interpreter that the content which follows is part of a new page. A page break causes a form feed to be sent to the printer during spooling of the document to the printer. Thus it is one of the elements that contributes to pagination.
In computer terminology, a fill character is a character transmitted solely for the purpose of consuming time. It does this by filling a timeslot on a data transmission line which would otherwise be forced to be idle (empty). In this way, fill characters provide a simple way of timing required idle times.
The Teletype Corporation, a part of American Telephone and Telegraph Company's Western Electric manufacturing arm since 1930, came into being in 1928 when the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company changed its name to the name of its trademark equipment. Teletype Corporation, of Skokie, Illinois, was responsible for the research, development and manufacture of data and record communications equipment, but it is primarily remembered for the manufacture of electromechanical teleprinters.
Sixel, short for "six pixels", is a bitmap graphics format supported by terminals and printers from DEC. It consists of a pattern six pixels high and one wide, resulting in 64 possible patterns. Each possible pattern is assigned an ASCII character, making the sixels easy to transmit on 7-bit serial links.
Continuous stationery (UK) or continuous form paper (US) is paper which is designed for use with dot-matrix and line printers with appropriate paper-feed mechanisms. Other names include fan-fold paper, sprocket-feed paper, burst paper, lineflow, tractor-feed paper, and pin-feed paper. It can be single-ply or multi-ply, often described as multipart stationery or forms. Continuous stationery is often used when the final print medium is less critical in terms of the appearance at the edges, and when continuously connected individual sheets are not inconvenient for the application. Individual sheets can be separated at the perforation, and sheets also have edges with punched holes, which also can be removed at the perforation.
The DECwriter series was a family of computer terminals from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They were typically used in a fashion similar to a teletype, with a computer output being printed to paper and the user inputting information on the keyboard. In contrast to teletypes, the DECwriters were based on dot matrix printer technology, one of the first examples of such a system to be introduced. Versions lacking a keyboard were also available for use as computer printers, which eventually became the only models as smart terminals became the main way to interact with mainframes and minicomputers in the 1980s.
Early mainframe printers were usually line printers. Line printers provide a limited set of commands to control how the paper is advanced when print lines are printed. The application writing reports, list, etc. to be printed has to include those commands in the print data. These single character print commands are called printer control characters.