Phasorburn (chaos monkey, esq.) 🇨🇦 on Nostr: Semi-related, back in the day I worked for a company selling serial terminals hanging ...

Semi-related, back in the day I worked for a company selling serial terminals hanging off unix systems and some medical / optometrist / dental practice management software. The printers were serial and sometimes on a dedicated cable and other times were connected to the second serial port on a terminal. The print subsystem would send an escape sequence to enable the printer port, a line of data, then another escape sequence to return the data output back to the screen.

So you could use the app on the terminal while the printer received a line to print at a time. The printer could buffer that line entirely most of the time. Almost unnoticable lag to the terminal user, who might actually have been at a remote location with a modem on the first serial port instead of a hard line to the unix box.