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On Sunday, 30 April 2017 23:12:44 UTC+1, Rod Speed wrote:
Andrew Mawson wrote

An original OKI Microline 80 has fallen into my hands,

Bet the hurt, they arent exactly light.

and apart from a faulty mains switch (fixed) seems to be in working
order.

This is a 7 pin impact printer with a Centronics Parallel input port.
Does
anyone remember if they were character by character printers

Yes.

or line by line?

Nope.

I'd like to prove it working and was going to wire up a simple 7 bit
wide
switch bank (with strobe) so I can toggle ascii characters into it one
by
one

Lot easier to get a parallel port or even a USB/centronics converter.

but before I do, it would be nice to know what it expects.

Character by character.

Needless to say no Windows 7 drivers out there that I can find

Anything that can drive a parallel port will work fine.

and I don't have a unix machine to hook it up to.

(I wish Microsoft had never dreamt up hardware abstraction layers !
Time
was when I could send characters directly to a port address from a
diddy
program ! )

You still can with Win7 if you want to.

Memory on this is patchy... but yes, charcter by character,

Yeah, other than that came later.

with either escape codes or something
else for non-printing control codes.

Some like CR LF etc were just reserved ascii chars.

Trying to remember, the dip switches
in those set the parallel code used.

Nope. The manuals are still online.

In the 7 pin era machines only had one font.

Yes.

9 pinners could typically print double
wide or double high characters too.

Yes, that that stuff was done with escape chars.

They also had a dot mode that could be used for pictures etc.

Vague memory & a quick google looks like
yours in a 1980s 9 pin. Are you sure it's a 7?

Doesnt matter on that question of seeing if it still prints.

Going to be interesting to see if its got any stuck pins.
That was the most common failure mode.