tech58761
Experienced Member
First, the accessory in question is decades gone (so no hope of a picture), but I am hoping someone can remember what I'm talking about and hopefully identify it based on the description.
When my dad first purchased the C64 for the family in 1984 (but really, within a year or so, it had been moved into my bedroom), we had this odd parallel printer interface that I've not seen or mentioned anywhere else in the decades since.
The whole thing was gray, with a molded housing on one end to fit the Centronics port, then the main cord was the same thickness as the typical Commodore serial cable, but it was coiled like a phone cord, and on the other end was a typical Commodore DIN connector, also with a gray housing. There was no external power tap like on so many other parallel interfaces of the day.
It also came with a software disk with 3-4 applications on it, but I only remember two. One was some kind of a graphics printing application, and the other was a word processor called WORDLINE. I only remember Wordline because of the dramatic effect when it started up (the main editor screen appeared in four stages) and it was THE ONLY C64 software I EVER used that saved data in USR files!
Sadly, the printer interface did not live up to expectations and it soon gave way to one of the more typical ones (you know, with a box, Centronics ribbon, DIN serial cable, and a wire to a Datasette connector).
I'm hoping that someone else may remember the cable and/or the bundled word processor...
When my dad first purchased the C64 for the family in 1984 (but really, within a year or so, it had been moved into my bedroom), we had this odd parallel printer interface that I've not seen or mentioned anywhere else in the decades since.
The whole thing was gray, with a molded housing on one end to fit the Centronics port, then the main cord was the same thickness as the typical Commodore serial cable, but it was coiled like a phone cord, and on the other end was a typical Commodore DIN connector, also with a gray housing. There was no external power tap like on so many other parallel interfaces of the day.
It also came with a software disk with 3-4 applications on it, but I only remember two. One was some kind of a graphics printing application, and the other was a word processor called WORDLINE. I only remember Wordline because of the dramatic effect when it started up (the main editor screen appeared in four stages) and it was THE ONLY C64 software I EVER used that saved data in USR files!
Sadly, the printer interface did not live up to expectations and it soon gave way to one of the more typical ones (you know, with a box, Centronics ribbon, DIN serial cable, and a wire to a Datasette connector).
I'm hoping that someone else may remember the cable and/or the bundled word processor...