Diablo

Diablo developed the first commercially successful daisy-wheel printer in 1972. The company was almost immediately taken over by Xerox, who wanted the technology for their developing line of word-processing systems (they had bought Redactron). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was another big user of Diablo daisywheel machines - particularly the Diablo 630 which was sold as the LQP01 to go with the DEC WPS-8 word processing software. (The Diablo 1620 had a keyboard and could double as a typewriter, there was a Rutishauser cut-sheet feeder available).

The Diablo 630 daisywheel printer was primarily like a typewriter although it could change fonts with exchangeable print wheels. It could use proportional spacing, underline, double-strike, strike-out, bold and shadow print. Margins, horizontal and vertical tabs could be set. The Diablo 630 commands were widely used. When laser printers were introduced in the mid 1980s they usually supported the Diablo 630 commands because they had been expected.

Disk Drives

Diablo also made a series of disk drives that were very popular with other manufacturers. The Diablo Model 31, a 2.5 MB front loading hard disk was used on Xerox PARC "Alto" computers. It was also used by Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-11 series and by BCL with the Molecular machines.