On Wed Dec 6 21:00:00 2023, 56g.1173 wrote to The Natural Philosopher <=-
On 12/6/23 10:53 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 06/12/2023 14:24, Theo wrote:
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:No mass storage. No output for an 80x25 style screen. I love my Picos finally, but they cannot even drive a floppy disk.
Many people I know would be entirely happy with Wordstar on CP/M and a >>> dot matrix printer....Come to think of it a pi Zero with a bit of screen >>> added and Joes Own Editor would do that.
Why use a clone when you can use the original on a Pico :-)
https://kevinboone.me/cpicom.html
Whereas a Zero can come with an SSD an HDMI attached screen and
probably drive a parallel port.
In terms of a 'word processing station' I think that is about ideal.
Agreed ... but I don't think anybody is going to put up
with an 80x24 screen anymore.
GUI/WYSIWYG is a lot better. There are a number of medium-power
word processors that run on Linux and the ubiquitous LibreOffice
suite adds even more clout. For dirt simple, use Leafpad and friends.
A Pico is a microCONTROLLER ... it's meant for operating "things"
or being a "thing".
Love microCs but there'd be no point in making a word-processor
using one. Yea, somewhere there IS a SD-Card library, so you can
have yer storage, and there IS a serial library so you can pull
out your beloved serial terminal (or make your own). Even
Ard Uno's have those libs handy. I even found a TCP stack lib
and made a (very slow/simple) web server out of one and hung it
on one of the company's unused domains for a couple of years.
ASCII-Art "graphics". Now a printer ... find an old Oki rs232
matrix printer or something so you won't need much for a 'driver'.
and I'm sure you could do the dot matrix bit with a Pico too:
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/giant-dot-matrix-printer
all very ingenious, but...I guess a zero running Raspios could drive a modern inkjet or laser printer via USB.
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