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Getting Started With Delta 19
Many of these lists of printers are not very clear, and may not
include anything that you think describes Delta. If you can’t
decide which description best fits Delta, we recommend that you
narrow the list to two or three choices (you can quickly eliminate
ail the daisy-wheel printer types) and then experiment. You won’t
hurt anything if you guess wrong; it just won’t work right. This
should quickly tell you if your guess is right. If ail else fails,
though, your Star dealer will be happy to give you some advice.
Some programs don’t ask you what kind of printer you have,
but instead they ask some questions about what your printer can
do. Here are the answers to the “most asked” questions. Delta can
do a “backspace”. Delta can do a “hardware form feed”.
With these questions answered, you are ready to start print-
ing. Read the manual that came with your commercial software to
see how to make it send information for Delta to print. This is ail
you need to know to use Delta as a regular printer. But Delta isn’t
just a regular printer. Delta has many capabilities that your com-
mercial software isn’t aware of. A little later we will see what it
takes to use some of Delta’s advanced features with commercial
software.
First, some terminology
Delta knows what to print because it knows how to interpret
the codes that the computer sends to it. These codes are numbers
that the computer sends to Delta. Both the computer and Delta
know the meaning of these codes because they are a set of stand-
ard codes used by almost ail microcomputers. This set of codes is
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which is
usually referred to as ASCII (pronounced ask-key). There are
ASCII codes for all the letters of the alphabet, both lower case and
capital, the numbers from 0 to 9, most punctuation marks, and
some (but not all) of Delta’s functions.
ASCII codes are referred to in several different ways, depend-
ing on the way they are used. Some times these codes are treated
as regular numbers. For example, the letter “A” is represented by
the number 65 in ASCII. Appendix M shows ail of the ASCII
codes.
In BASIC, ASCII codes are used in the CHR$ function. This
function is used to print the character that is represented by the
number in the CHR$ function. The BASIC statement PRINT
CHR$(65) will print an “A” on the terminal.
In some other programming languages, ASCII codes are
referred to by their hex value. “Hex” is short for hexadecimal
which is a base-16 number system. (Our usual numbers are base-