My First Laptop Computer

[MineralMan]

44. My first printer was a Radio Shack Daisy Wheel Printer.

That was because magazines wanted typewriter quality submissions for articles. There was no Microsoft Word printer driver for that Radio Shack printer, though, and I used Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS. However, I got a copy of that program's printer driver developer kit from Microsoft and created a driver for that printer.

Naive fellow that I was, I sent a copy of the driver on a floppy disk to Microsoft, which included it in the next release of Word. I knew they used my version of the driver, because I had added a feature that allowed the printer to print in boldface by using three tiny shifts of the paper and over-typing the boldfaced characters. It made a distinctive machine gun sound when it was printing those characters, and the new version of Word's printer driver for that Radio Shack daisy wheel printer used the same technique.

Within a couple of years, I could submit manuscripts on floppy disk to most of the magazines I wrote for. A couple of years after that, I was able to talk editors through the process of downloading my articles from my BBS system. It was heady times in those days, and everyone was improvising as fast as they could.