First, Some Terminology - Star Micronics Radix User Manual

Getting Started With Radix
17
thing that you think describes Radix. If you can't decide which
description best fits Radix, we recommend that you narrow the
list to two or three choices (you can quickly eliminate all the daisy-
wheel printer types) and then experiment. You won't hurt any-
thing if you guess wrong; it just won't work right. This should
quickly tell you if your guess is right. If all else fails, though, your
Star dealer will be happy to give you some advice.
Some programs don't ask you what kind of printer you have,
but instead they ask some questions about what your printer can
do. Here are the answers to the "most asked" questions. Radix can
do a "backspace". Radix can do a "hardware form feed".
With these questions answered, you are ready to start print-
ing. Read the manual that came with your commercial software
and Chapters 3 through 5 of this manual to see how to make it
send information for Radix to print. This is all you need to know
to use Radix as a regular printer. But Radix isn't just a regular
printer. Radix has many capabilities that your commercial soft-
ware isn't aware of. A little later we will see what it takes to use
some of Radix's advanced features with commercial software.
First, some terminology
Radix knows what to print because it knows how to interpret
the codes that the computer sends to it. These codes are numbers
that the computer sends to Radix. Both the computer and Radix
know the meaning of these codes because they are a set of stand-
ard codes used by almost all microcomputers. This set of codes is
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which is
usually referred to as ASCII (pronounced ask-key). There are
ASCII codes for all the letters of the alphabet, both lower case and
capital, the numbers from 0 to 9, most punctuation marks, and
some (but not all) of Radix's functions.
ASCII codes are referred to in several different ways, depend-
ing on the way they are used. Some times these codes are treated
as regular numbers. For example, the letter "A" is represented by
the number 65 in ASCII. Appendix M shows all of the ASCII
codes.
In BASIC, ASCII codes are used in the CHR$ function. This
function is used to print the character that is represented by the
number in the CHR!$ function. The BASIC statement PRINT
CHR$(65) will print an "A" on the terminal.
In some other programming languages, ASCII codes are
referred to by their hex value. "Hex" is short for hexadecimal
which is a base-16 number system (our usual numbers are base-lo)
Since hex needs
16
digits, it uses the numbers 0 through 9 and