What are they used for today? I assume they have better reliability (from their simpler technology) compared to inkjet or laser printers, which keeps them popular in certain industries.
They also work with carbon paper, so they're popular for use cases where they want a stack of guaranteed-identical copies in one go (e.g. doctors offices still seem to have them quite often. print prescription, doctor signs it, copy for the records can be pulled off)
Just a few days ago, I realized, the best thing to update somebody else's code, would be to print it out and take it to bed with me, so I can read the source without starring into that lamp (the monitor). I also could make notes with a pen, like placing the line number next to a function call (pointing to the function definition), etc.
Problem was, that the printout would have been over a hundred pages. Too expensive and feels like a waste of resources.
Then I remembered dot-matrix printers and checked out the market. They go about EUR200+ these days. Sadly, the one I'd liked (DIN A3 format, so to be able to print out long lines of code without wrapping, with 4 colors for some basic syntax highlite) are in the EUR1000 range.
My text-editor on the Amiga (in the 90's) would have a special print utility, that would allow to format the text (source code) in a way to fit as much text on the paper as possible, by choosing a smaller font, having multiple columns, etc.
Interestingly, nothing similar seems in production, these days.
So, ideally there'd be an affordable dot-matrix color printer, without a fixed line length (set it in the driver), and some pleasing monotype font for coders (including special chars like function arrows) as one of its internal charsets along with a utility I described above. My eyes would love it!
Modern office inkjet printers can be quite cheap too, at ~3$ ink cost per thousand pages b/w. E.g. Canon's Pixma G series has models with integrated tanks you can refill with ink bottles (instead of cartridges).
If it's a hundred pages on laser, how is it going to be any fewer pages on dot matrix? It's not like dot matrix is going to magically improve spatial information density. Also toner is the most efficient use of ink, a ribbon is certainly not efficient.
They go about EUR200+ these days. Sadly, the one I'd liked (DIN A3 format, so to be able to print out long lines of code without wrapping, with 4 colors for some basic syntax highlite) are in the EUR1000 range.
The reason for this being that they're still produced with the same level of quality they used to be, while "consumer level" printers have become more cost-optimised and less reliable. Dot matrix printers are still used in commercial/industrial applications so they haven't been subjected to the same race-to-the-bottom that consumer printers have.
Yes, I understand. InkJets bring in the money via the ink and also, the market for dot-matrix must now be smaller, than it was, when that printing technique was the only affordable on the market.
They're good for logging things, because they print one line (or character at a time), not one page at time. If you redirect your logfile to one, everything will be committed to paper once the line is finished, and you wont need to buffer things to disk or memory (where they are vulnerable to erasure by hackers or power failures) until you have a full page
It was popular even in the USSR in mid-80s. MX-80 were brought in the Soviet Union as a part of Yamaha MSX-2 based computer classes for Soviet children. I remember my joy when I was able to print black and white New Year’s postcard with nice fonts and graphics on that printer in 1985 :-)
Still have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me.
The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.
This sort of thing is actually exactly what backspace was originally for - it predates computers, and was used on typewriters to e.g. make accented characters, or underline text (ASCII has underscore as a symbol for that exact purpose). You could also make things bold by doing backspace and then re-printing the same character, one or more times.
Right, and that usage was later carried on to Unix man pages. Hence this tiny but handy script I wrote (and have used for years), to strip those formatting characters:
m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:
I first had an Okidata. (Someone else's selection. I later picked up a used MX-80 -- or FX-80; I forget at the moment and don't feel like going to the basement cupboard to check.)
It, too, could backspace. Mushing together characters got me umlauted vowels and Eszett.
That cable was apparently not universal for a while. I needed to make a cable for the Apple II parallel port to an MX-80. I forget why now, but it needed DB25 on one end and maybe a Molex header on the other.
You mean, you threw away the manual, so you'd have to find out everything yourself, by playing/hacking with the system?
Man, that'd be some real "Guy Hardening" you did there :-). Like, leaving your clothes at home and having a walk in the snow naked, sliding down the hill like a seal and rolling yourself back up.
It's neat that this manual from 1980 actually has an author prominently attributed and "Personal Note from the Author".
I had an RX-80 that, that I loved, until it died in the same lightning storm that killed my Atari 800. I replaced it with a Panasonic, don't remember the model, but it was also a very good dot matrix printer.
I loved that printer. Did so much with it and was the first time I really did a bunch of stuff with ESC sequences. Bidirectional printing was cool and getting it to print graphics by driving the print head directly felt like magic. Anyone who programmed that printer will be instantly at home with Epson (and compatible) thermal printers and more.
Indeed! I remember using one to print zooms of the Mandelbrot set in grayscale (highly dithered) from an Apple ][+. For speed I coded in 6502 and called directly into the BASIC floating point routines for the math. The printer would take a day or so to print a sheet worth of image. But it was a great graphic output device, far less ephemeral than the screen. It was somewhat satisfying for it to print a new row of dots every now and then, once the computer had completed some math...
I think the ESC/P was the newer ones after the LQ series.
I spent many an hour on our FX-80 (the successor to the MX-80), mostly doing label printing code for my dad's pharmacy. With all the escape codes documented it was great. The FX had the trick of being able to do reverse feed (From memory Esc [ 2j I think - heck that was some time ago?)
In working on an Android app for thermal receipt printers, I just recently learned how pervasive these control codes still are! It's great that Epson has kept up on very clear documentation, and even a surprisingly well made Android library.
My father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro.
I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images sideways you could read a byte of horizontal scanline data from memory and throw it directly at the printer, which treated it as a vertical column of dots; this meant you didn't need the painfully expensive step of rotating each 8x8 character cell.
Simple in hindsight, but it took ages to realise, and made screen dumps so much simpler and faster.
Seems you were hacking yours differently to what I was doing. I acquired some army headed letter (UK), or rather 'stole'. With it I forged a letter with my MX-80 to trick a friend's parent to pop into the army recruitment centre.
This friend's parent had skived off National Service many aeons ago and I pranked him into going back to account for himself. The letter 'had to be legit' because it wasn't hand typed. So easily fooled. The things you do as a small child that you would never do as an adult.
Most of it is painted, that's why its not yellowing.
Unfortunately the paintwork is a little worse for wear in a few places. I did dig up the paint codes that IBM used, but what would be difficult to factor in is the slight discolouring over time.
There are two plastic plugs on the top of the CRT which cover up some screws, those did need retrobriting, but the rest of the casing is painted plastic and metal, the ABS underneath is neither visible nor exposed to UV light.
Also the paint is actually scuffed and lightly worn off in a few places, retrobrite won't do anything about that. It either needs new paint, or I need to accept it as patina.
Used one of these back in the day. Excellent machines. Paper feed was so much more reliable and error-free compared to modern printers. And when things went wrong a reset and restart of the job was simple. Now I have to revere the psychology of the machine, and hope to god that its fragile plastic innards don't break.
I'd willingly return to needing special printer paper if it meant I didn't have issues with the feeding mechanism.
+1 for these. I've owned an HL-2270DW for almost 10 years and it continues to work flawlessly. Before that I had a similar USB only version. I just purchased it's color capable cousin as a Christmas gift.
Add me to the list of people supporting this message. Mine is 13 years old and I've never had a problem with it.
(The UI is very simple: one button. I don't know what it does, as I've never needed to press it. If a document fails to print, that just means the thing is out of paper.)
i owned one of these back in the 90's, i remember connecting this to my compaq 286 with a lpt1 port or whatever you call it. no color, but i remember printing nude gifs i had back thrn of playboy playmates.
fyi, in china, when you eat at restaurants or buy things from stores you get these government tax receipts which are typically printed with these epsons, that's almost 30 years since i first started using these.
I saved up money to buy one of these in college, was amazing, fast, sounded like a well tuned race car :-) Still have some CSCI homework and projects on paper printed on this from my Atari ST.
Not sure how it compared to the MX-80, but it was definitely a great printer for its time. I remember finally replacing it was a 24-pin (oh the luxury) dot matrix printer after years of service by the FX-80.
There was a program called Fancy Font that let you do a primitive form of DTP on one of these. You typed up your document in the Fancy Font markup language and then sent it off to the printer using the Fancy Font runoff program (called 'pfont'), which would print out the document, using graphics mode to render the, er, fancy fonts.
Documents printed out this way on a dot matrix printer looked like ass, so when they became available Fancy Font supported the new exciting HP LaserJets.
Is there an emulator that handles this printer? I am working on a 3D multicore libretro frontend with Lua scripting. It would be interesting for me to have virtual printouts (images) to go along with a 3d model for something like this.
I remember those, and often prefer them over ink-jet because one could often fix any problems themselves. With ink-jets, if there's problems, it's hard to see what's actually going on. You usually have to rely on software drivers to diagnose and/or clean them, which often fail for some reason (probably version compatibility). I'm really disappointed with ink-jets. The higher-quality dot-matrix ribbons rarely broke, just got tangled. You could untangle it and get back to work. The problems and solutions were more clear-cut, hands-on, and visual. If they could make dot-matrix printers match the resolution of ink-jets, I just may get one, at least as a back-up.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadhttps://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact/c/w160
My first job was working on those printers, they haven't changed much 36 years later.
Pre-printed slips on continuous feed paper fed into the printers on tracks. The printer then prints the name/amount.
Same thing happens with checks. You can get them on continuous feed paper for dot matrix printers.
Lots of legacy applications for official documents I imagine.
> They are good, reliable workhorses ideal for use in situations where low printing cost is more important than quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#Flatbed_do...
Problem was, that the printout would have been over a hundred pages. Too expensive and feels like a waste of resources.
Then I remembered dot-matrix printers and checked out the market. They go about EUR200+ these days. Sadly, the one I'd liked (DIN A3 format, so to be able to print out long lines of code without wrapping, with 4 colors for some basic syntax highlite) are in the EUR1000 range.
My text-editor on the Amiga (in the 90's) would have a special print utility, that would allow to format the text (source code) in a way to fit as much text on the paper as possible, by choosing a smaller font, having multiple columns, etc.
Interestingly, nothing similar seems in production, these days.
So, ideally there'd be an affordable dot-matrix color printer, without a fixed line length (set it in the driver), and some pleasing monotype font for coders (including special chars like function arrows) as one of its internal charsets along with a utility I described above. My eyes would love it!
Also, I'd like to have a A3 sized, colored dot matrix printer. That as Laser would be extremly expensive.
The reason for this being that they're still produced with the same level of quality they used to be, while "consumer level" printers have become more cost-optimised and less reliable. Dot matrix printers are still used in commercial/industrial applications so they haven't been subjected to the same race-to-the-bottom that consumer printers have.
The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.
That's awesome. Thanks for sharing, because as somebody who grow up with windows 3.1 being the earliest OS, these stories are great.
m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-...
It, too, could backspace. Mushing together characters got me umlauted vowels and Eszett.
Man, that'd be some real "Guy Hardening" you did there :-). Like, leaving your clothes at home and having a walk in the snow naked, sliding down the hill like a seal and rolling yourself back up.
http://www.thecomputerarchive.com/thearchive/Manuals/Epson%2...
I had an RX-80 that, that I loved, until it died in the same lightning storm that killed my Atari 800. I replaced it with a Panasonic, don't remember the model, but it was also a very good dot matrix printer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo
and
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6040/Epson-LX-80/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P
I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images sideways you could read a byte of horizontal scanline data from memory and throw it directly at the printer, which treated it as a vertical column of dots; this meant you didn't need the painfully expensive step of rotating each 8x8 character cell.
Simple in hindsight, but it took ages to realise, and made screen dumps so much simpler and faster.
Seems you were hacking yours differently to what I was doing. I acquired some army headed letter (UK), or rather 'stole'. With it I forged a letter with my MX-80 to trick a friend's parent to pop into the army recruitment centre.
This friend's parent had skived off National Service many aeons ago and I pranked him into going back to account for himself. The letter 'had to be legit' because it wasn't hand typed. So easily fooled. The things you do as a small child that you would never do as an adult.
http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/new-blinds.JPG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9vzMVK5kV8
Unfortunately the paintwork is a little worse for wear in a few places. I did dig up the paint codes that IBM used, but what would be difficult to factor in is the slight discolouring over time.
There are two plastic plugs on the top of the CRT which cover up some screws, those did need retrobriting, but the rest of the casing is painted plastic and metal, the ABS underneath is neither visible nor exposed to UV light.
Also the paint is actually scuffed and lightly worn off in a few places, retrobrite won't do anything about that. It either needs new paint, or I need to accept it as patina.
I'd willingly return to needing special printer paper if it meant I didn't have issues with the feeding mechanism.
(The UI is very simple: one button. I don't know what it does, as I've never needed to press it. If a document fails to print, that just means the thing is out of paper.)
fyi, in china, when you eat at restaurants or buy things from stores you get these government tax receipts which are typically printed with these epsons, that's almost 30 years since i first started using these.
[1] http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp-content/uplo...
Not sure how it compared to the MX-80, but it was definitely a great printer for its time. I remember finally replacing it was a 24-pin (oh the luxury) dot matrix printer after years of service by the FX-80.
Documents printed out this way on a dot matrix printer looked like ass, so when they became available Fancy Font supported the new exciting HP LaserJets.