Whoa Daisy!

I don't know if we were quite prepared for the noise and vibration of the daisy wheel printer that Mr. Alessi bought. This kind of printer was called a daisy wheel because it has what looked like a black plastic flower with the letters and numbers on the petals. This sort of device was borrowed straight from typewriter technology. To print each letter the wheel would spin around and a hammer would knock the desired petal against the paper. It would also rapidly shift up and down because there was more than one symbol on each petal. The wheel assembly would swing back and forth energetically (zooming is a good word for this) as it printed each page. It was loud, and it would shake the table like a bucking bronco! It was intolerable. The printer did produce nice clean and smooth black characters on the page, so we kept using it. The solution to all the noise and vibration was to sit the printer on top of a very large and thick piece of mattress foam. This worked a lot better than it probably should have.

Looking for a Computer

Computers were very expensive back in 1980. My father worked for GTE at that time and he was offered a deal on the Rockell AIM-65 computer http://oldcomputers.net/AIM-65.html since GTE and Rockwell had some sort of relationship. It was a nice 6502-based computer and ran BASIC. It was small, had a single line display, and a built-in thermal printer.

Obviously a computer with a full size display screen (though one could be added) would have been preferable but we were excited at the prospect of having a computer in the house! Ultimately the AIM-65 was not our fate because my father decided that the nature of the deal amounted to a conflict of interest.