Sheila Dixon built a functioning teletype terminal for the RC2014 retrocomputer using an Alphacom thermal printer, the same third-party peripheral that ZX81 owners bought to escape Sir Clive Sinclair's notoriously poor original. The Alphacom connects directly to the RC2014's Z80 bus the same way it did on the ZX81's expansion port, driven by custom ROM routines that treat it as the system's standard terminal output.
The keyboard side is equally period-correct: first an MSX keyboard, then a hand-built unit with retro typewriter keycaps, scanned through an 8255 I/O port card. No microcontrollers, no abstraction layers. The full read is worth it for the bus interfacing details and the specific ROM routines Dixon wrote to wrangle 1980s printer hardware into a 2026 retrocomputing workflow.
This project sits at an intersection the RC2014 community rarely explores: using original peripheral hardware exactly as originally designed, rather than modern recreations. Dixon's troubleshooting notes on the teething problems alone justify the click.
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