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Several technologies enabled this quality and speed:
  • The lightweight Plastic Daisy Wheel was rotated by a Closed-loop Servo and could be positioned rapidly and accurately. Because the wheel could turn in either direction, the next character was never more than 180° away from the previous character (and related characters were grouped together so the average "seek" was much less than 180°).

  • The printer used cartridge-loaded ribbons; both an economical endless cloth ribbon and a high-quality single-use film ribbon were available with colored ribbons provided by third parties.

  • The carriage was also servo-controlled and the printer could print with the carriage moving either forwards or backwards, saving most of the time that would otherwise be spent executing carriage-returns.

  • Paper motion was similarly servo-controlled allowing quick printing of Subscript s and Superscript s as well as fast slewing past white space.



In addition, the daisy wheel could be easily changed, allowing a wide variety of Font s and character pitches.

The same mechanism was also sold to OEM s. One notable user was Digital Equipment Corporation who resold the printer as the LQP01 (with a parallel interface) and the LQPSE (with an RS232 serial interface) and supported by Digital's WPS-8 Word Processing software.