I have been searching for the first, genuine, Digital Group printer (known as the "A" or "B" printer, depending on the controller version) for many years now. During a recent trip to the Vintage Computer Festival 6.0 (See the pics!!), I met Bruce Damer of the Digibarn, and he offered me this printer, knowing that it would be loved and well cared for! The darn things are near impossible to find! But now I have one! Yee-ha!

The printer is a 7-pin dot matrix printer that was manufactured by Practical Automation of Shelton Connecticut for the Digital Group. This 96 column printer advertised a speed of 120 cps, and a software based character set. Which meant that you could define your own characters: double wide, bold, etc. Although this was billed as a plus, it basically meant that the printer was "dumb"; it had no built in data processing ability. Your main processor did all the dirty work: timing, paper advance, printhead operations, etc.
  

The first advertisement, Byte 3/77

Since Dr. Suding, the designer of all things Digital Group, was not a big fan of interrupt programming, background printing was clumsy at best, but it worked well enough, bugs aside, and it was great quality printing for the day at a reasonable price. The printer sold complete for $495 in kit form, and $675 fully assembled. Other printers of the era sold for as much as $2700. At the time, some new cars sold for that much.

This printer could also print up to four copies simultaneously, on standard size letter or form feed paper, making it immediately useful for business applications. Along with software available from the Digital Group, this became one of the first hobbyist computers to make the transition to business computing, where the big money was thought to be.