Description
Commodore 1520 printer/plotter
Untested
The Commodore 1520 is a printer/plotter sold for the Commodore 64. It was introduced circa 1982.
The device takes 114 mm wide plain paper (of which 96 mm is printable) from the roll and draws with four short ballpoint pen refills of different colors, which are stored in a revolver magazine and can be pressed onto the paper using an electromagnetic drive. So it can be called a ballpoint plotter.
Like most peripheral devices in the Commodore home computer series, the VC-1520 also has its own command set and can be controlled using it. Commands for absolute and relative positioning, pen control and color selection are just as much part of the scope as the option of writing letters and numbers by specifying the corresponding CBM-ASCII character. In the smallest font size, up to 80 characters per line can be written at a speed that was acceptable at the time, so that the plotter also offered itself as an inexpensive alternative to a printer, especially since the typeface was superior to a 9-pin matrix printer.
