Love this! I kept my grandparents awake many nights in high school while I printed papers for English and chemistry class. True Decenders were key to getting the subscripts correct in chemical formulas.
This channel is a gem! Your in-depth technical knowledge is amazing, of course, but what keeps me hooked is the sheer amount of fun you seem to having explaining this stuff.
in the early 90s, i printed the walkthrough for leisure suit larry on my brother's epson printer with continuous paper in dark mode. it had to take 3 passes for each dot. and it didn't print a whole line at a time. it was 2 or maybe 3 parts to a line of text. I think it was a 9-pin head. about 60 pages for the walkthrough. a few days later, i cleared the game and i told my friends in school. they wanted a printout too. mine was too special to me so i didn't give them my copy. i wanted the noise. i needed the noise. so i printed a new copy. i did make the mistake of starting the job at night. my family were soo pissed. i had to lock my room door to prevent them from coming in and turning the damn thing off. those were the days. being 12 and learning to code in turbo pascal. thanks for this video. really took my back there.
Thank you for this. Just last week I scolded a channel host for saying impact printers were "almost non-existent". I've been working on them for 40 years and my company has hundreds of serial- matrix and high-speed shuttle matrix printers under contract around the country. Next they'll be saying flip-phones are outdated...... Geez.
one use I saw with a dot matrix printer was on a security alarm system for the ability to use it as a line-by-line print without the need to throw an entire page. effectively as a teletype or ticker tape system.
When I was a kid in the early 70s, my dad would bring me and my brother into work at the university when he had to go in for a few hours on the weekend. Occasionally that meant a visit to the computer machine room. Once, to keep me entertained, he had an operator make for me a dot matrix print out of the profile of TOS USS Enterprise. It was printed out on probably a dozen or more fan folded large format light green/white striped paper for massive spreadsheets. Made a great banner. After watching your video, I found the university has some photos online of the old computer rooms of that era including one showing a large a dot matrix printer. :)
fun fact: the print screen key on the keyboard was intent to litetry print all the text that was on screen even the lines that you just have typed in on older DoS machines.
In 1999 i started in the IT world repairing PC's and Oki printers. I setup the 1st uk demo of wireless printing at a huge IT event. I used to repair Oki printers down to components, loved doing it
Wow... I cannot believe that dot-matrix printers are a now a novelty. In the beginning of my career, I repaired probably thousands of impact printers. Man, I am old! Apart from multi-part forms and cheques, automotive manufactures still use impact printers (shuttle printers to be specific) for vehicle configuration on the assembly line and for shadow marking labels on body panels. I used to love working on those printers. Such a cool technology! Thank you for bringing impact printers back to life!
As someone who receives shipments from logistics companies, I see dot matrix printed forms weekly. The bill of lading forms are just like the 1099's, and need to be signed. That's where the multiple copy at once feature of dot matrix comes in handy. Great explanation about how forgotten stuff is still being used now, like how I'm running MVS on my Linux box using QEMU.
I love my dot matrix printer. I seriously use my Tandy DMP-206 weekly, sometimes daily, far more than I use the laser printer. A big part of what I use it for is an old comic collector software for DOS. It does everything I want it to, I can update the database as I wish pretty easily, and it doesn't constantly pester me to pay for some premium version or pay a monthly fee to use the software. The best thing though is that I can print lists of print-runs for whatever comic series I want, or what I usually use it for, printing off separate lists for what I own and what I am missing from a particular run. Because all the pages are connected, it makes a great continuous list that I can fold up and flip through as needed without having to staple pages together or punch them to fit in a binder. I also use my dot matrix printer to print record sheets for the Battletech board game, which I play usually once a week. I personally find the software for Windows 3.x to be much simpler and easier to use than newer versions and it gives me an excuse to use my DMP-206. In addition, I like to use my DOS computer for creative writing as it gives me a more isolated space without the distractions of having 20 different youtube tabs open, and I can easily print out my stories on my dot matrix printer, and again, don't need to fuss with annoying staples or hole punchers and binders. My friends think I'm pretty odd for having such enthusiasm for old technology, but I don't care. I love it!
When I worked for the phone company, we had four of these at the office. Three of them were for call completion accounting and one was for diagnostic messages from the switch. They were installed in the 80s and were still working tirelessly the day the center was shut down.
From the UK. I began computing learning U.C.S.D. Pascal in the late 80s on a 8086 PC and dot matrix printers were common place then. Local to me Panasonic sold a lot of them. Great memories. The downside of the inkjets that came next is the rip-off ink prices. From your videos , you have a wide range of knowledge of things I.T., and your videos are interesting and thought provoking. Please continue. Thank You.
at that time getting the language specific(french,german, icelandic) characters printed was a bit more challenging than today. also the printer driver wasn't used systemwide and you had to make sure your printer was compatible to a specific model from ibm, nec or epson.
Exactly. Each DOS app needed its own printer driver and usually there was one. Or maybe two. Most printers could emulate multiple generic printer models and hopefully one of them (usually IBM or Epson) worked with your software. The printer needed to be set to the correct emulation using DIP switches. Most people back then also printed in text mode, something I don't think exists with modern inkjet printers (Laser printers don't ever had it I think, or maybe only really old ones). That means the software only sent raw ASCII to the printer and the font was selected on the printer itself rather than in your word processing software. Obviously that limited your choic of fonts to about 4-6 rather than the dozens and dozens modern apps offer. Actually, Windows 3.x and Apple's System 7 came with only six or so fonts pre-installed, the number of fonts only exploded with Windows 95 and MS Office 97. Later printer drivers selected graphics mode if you printed in high quality (near-letter quality or letter quality as it was called on dot matrix printers) and text mode only if you chose "Draft". 9-pin printers only offered NLQ, 24-pin printers could do LQ, which looks fairly reasonable, especially with a decent ribbon. My Epson LQ-100 produced text that was surprisingly hard to distinguish from early-2000s inkjet printouts with the ribbon I got it with and the printer was nearly free. We used that at school from about 2001-2003 because ink was expensive and would have dried quite quickly as we didn't print a whole lot. Being able to print the occasional homework sheet or other assignment was definitely worth the wait and noise with the dot matrix printer and I don't think anyone ever complained.
Awesome video. I remember in the early 90's when they were still improving dot matrix printers and making them faster. I'd print out my source code. It was like 500+ pages. I'd need to setup a fan near the printer to keep it from overheating. A few years ago I bought an old one on eBay and wrote some software to allow my elderly friend who had Parkinsons do his checks. It made it much easier on him.
I own two oki’s. The 321 and the 4410. These are wide carriage models. Both have the Ethernet adapter option. Use them mostly to print and review code. Will never let them go! I enjoy any and all content that involves dot matrix printers. Thank you for posting.
These printers are still used in almost all airports in the world. We use them to print documents like passengers informations list, load sheets or flight plans in multiple copies at once. They are very sturdy and the main advantage is that they are very cheap to maintain and you can print a long list on one single page very quickly. At my airport we use the OKI Microline 320 turbo.
haven't owned a printer for 15 years+. Watched video. 20 mins later im looking at prices of Oki Microline 420 printers on ebay. later, im thinking; this lady knows how to make compelling videos! [SUBSCRIBED]
This is a very cool channel! Thanks for the uploads! I was taking care of my dad until a few years ago and in the 80’s he was a CPA and used Banner Mania on his DOS computer. Well, after he retired he would go to the VFW bar and he liked to print out birthday banners but his DOS computer was starting to have issues so I copied the program to a floppy disk 💾 and installed it on a Windows XP system that would run DOS programs and I plugged in his Epson LQ 2550 dot matrix printer. That Epson is a tank and there are plenty of places that still sell ribbons for them so I’d buy a dozen at a time. The paper is easy to get too. Windows 7 won’t run DOS programs btw. The drivers are available online for older models. Btw, those graphics on your sweater from the old print program totally rocks! 😁
Back in the early 2000s I used to have a headless server built into the base of my bookshelf. I had it hooked up to a dot matrix printer in the next room to print bootup error messages and critical log messages. It seemed a lot more convenient than keeping up a constant connection to the server.
This is such a great video and reminds me of my CompTIA A+ certification test. lots of questions about printers and specifically dot matrix printers for some reasons.
My first ever job, was a System Admin for a large Paper Mill. Despite inkjets and laser printers being available, Dot Matrix printers were always used, because they just worked. Love them!
Thank you for sharing. As well as the explanation that while dot matrix may have been a common sight in the 80s to around the mid 90s when inkjet and laser printer came down in price and began to take over, most folks think the dot matrix is a relic from a bygone time. I actually seen them used a couple years ago at Enterprise when I picked up a rental car after my car was totaled in a crash. That was in the summer of 2020 and I had no idea they were still used, last time before that was in the early 2000s, when I was in middle school. Given the fact they were very reliable and rugged, and the ink ribbon lasts longer and is cheaper than ink cartridges or toner cartridges, and worked good with carbon copy paper, it's only natural they still have their place and time.
I am beginning to research using a dot matrix printer with a microcontroller and found your video. I love all about this video and will dive into your channel now, nerdy female greetings to you and the other peeps involved!
Watching videos like this makes me wonder why I parted with some of my old tech, now that I'm into retro PCs and stuff like that. After my sister no longer wanted her Panasonic dot matrix printer (and it was a beauty), I did her a favor by having it recycled. Sigh. Who knew that we'd be interested in this old hardware again.
Where I used to work in a pub company our pubs used 3 types of printer. The back office had a colour laser, used for printing menu's and other A4 stuff. The tills had thermal printers to print receipts and orders for the bar etc. The kitchen however has dot matrix receipt printers, this is done as standard as the heat from the kitchen will ruin a thermal roll and the printer tends to get covered in all sorts of grease and powdery food ingredients. That environment would kill a thermal printer or anything else very quickly but the dot matrix printers are way more rugged. They are also extremely accessible allowing the pub staff to perform maintenance including using compressed air to blow the crap out from the mechanism. I had to replace a couple, usually because the print head was unable to move the ribbon up and down to print either black or red text, it would get stuck on one colour. Something would jam that bit of the mechanism and I never managed to find the time to figure out how to get deep enough in to clean it.
Dot matrix printers are popular at car rental outlets for printing rental contracts on three or four layer carbon-less forms. They are also used for printing passwords or other personal information *inside* sealed envelopes (multipart forms that come with the edges already glued together) on printers with no ribbons installed, or vertical ribbons that are only as wide as the address field.
I work at a grocery store, part of a large chain nonetheless, and they still use a very similar looking dot matrix printer to yours for printing things when distributors come in. It is interesting to see how these things can be configured. Regardless, these things still apparently have their uses.
You absolutely can connect a serial printer to that Haas SL20 (@2:55) and every other Haas lathe/mill/etc. and "punch" (old CNC lingo for punch paper tape) the program out. In fact, you can punch the G-code part program, tool offsets, and machine parameters and a serial printer will be happy to print it for you. No printer driver installation needed. Just need to configure the Haas (or whatever brand of CNC) serial port to match that of what the printer requires. In my 35 years of working on CNC machinery, I've never encountered one that had a parallel port for a printer, but it is (or was) probably out there.
The cheapest way of connecting an old printer to a modern system is a USB - parallel adaptor. I got mine for a very reasonable price some 15 years ago. It happily ran my ancient Apple LaserWriter and my Epson LQ-100 from then-modern OSs. A little correction though: at 7:39 the port on the left is an RS-232 serial port and the one on the right is a parallel Centronics port. The latter was by far the most common port for home and office printers in the late 80s through 1990s, eventually replaced by USB. Macs used a much smaller and neater serial RS-422 connections. The plug is quite similar to a PS/2 connector to give you an idea of its size, not much larger than a USB B. I was told the most common application of impact printers these days is when carbon (less) copies are a legal requirement. If you print multiple copies, there's no technical way of proving they're identical. Carbon copies or carbonless copies are necessarily identical, which is why they're sometimes required for legal paperwork. Better dot matrix printers could load the paper automatically. Just align the perforation, turn the printer on and press a button (which one depends on your printer model) and the machine automatically loads the paper to the print head. These printers usually also have a "park" feature that unloads the fanfold paper to allow you to print on a single sheet of paper, e.g. office stationery, and once you're done, the printer automatically reloads the fanfold paper. Fun fact: fanfold paper is the only non-metric paper size in Europe that I'm aware of. DIN A4, the most common printer paper size, is 297x210 mm while German standard fanfold is 8 1/2" x 12" (215.9x304.8 mm) because those printers could only move the papers in increments of some fractions of an inch. I just had a look at my old fanfold paper and it's yet another size, I've got two boxes of 240 mm by 12", which is an even weirder mix of measurement units.
I miss my Commodore MPS 801 dot matrix printer. I remember buying it at SEARS. The printer was noisy but much loved. As for modern day use in the industry, an airline or two still use them at the gates. Rock solid performance and reliability for what is asked of them.
Love it. 🥰 I've always been a fan of the dot matrix: the sound, seeing the image form on the paper (unlike the "hidden" magic of lasers, or messy inkjets), and the idea of "robot printing." Coincidentally, I recently dug out my old Tandy DMP-105 for my Color Computer 2, and decided to connect it to my Windows 11 computer. A USB-to-Parallel adapter and reinked dry ribbon, I was printing text-only documents---I was overjoyed. Magically, a friend also gave me a 25+ year old Okidata 320 with a fresh-in-box ribbon; and this beast prints beautifully & fast (my 105 may be feeling jealous).
Thank You! I I have a 1990? Toshiba ExpressWriter 420 dot matrix printer. When I donated my 1989 HeadStart Explorer XT computer to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain view, CA back in 2012. they did not want this printer that I had used with it. Rather than let them "e-cycle" it as they offered to do, I brought it back home instead, and it has remained n its original box ever since. Having become involved with collecting and repairing antique & vintage typewriters during the past three years, maybe it's time for me to unbox the Toshiba printer and see if it will come back to life.....😉👍
I worked at Staples in Germany and we had a hand full of customers who orderd dot matrix printer supplies. Turns out, they owned Funeral Homes and print the Ribbons with these Printers.
The oil change place I go to was still using a DOS applicaiton and dot matrix printer (an Epson MX80 IIRC) until recently. They have moved up to Zebra Thermal printer and newer software. The new label printer prints the sticker for the windshield while a Dell laser prints the receipt.
Thank you so much! At 4:33, you hit the nail on the head by validating the use of these machines for making receipts, carbon copies... As a computer geek, EE, a dream is to have a small business. Emailed receipts are great; although, that good old fashioned paper receipt is still the preference of some. Yup, about to subscribe! As an EE that transitioned from computer engineering early in my matriculation to EE, Power Systems, I will have had a deep desire longing for the computer engineers and scientists' mastery of administration and building of applications. Don't get me wrong, I've programmed microcontrollers and the like and can handle the math of dealing with AC, loss, electromagnetics, blah, blah, blah; however, I found that one of my professors started as an EE. Currently a computer science professor, he still retains his background in EE. His thoughts are a mirror of my own--I had lost something. Sure it was cool to solve physical phenomena and the like with finite element method on clusters and nodes, accelerating code with HPC technology, and sampling a host of other goodies, however, while watching colleagues creating awesome programs and applications! At the end of the master's, writing a thesis, I am conflicted as to the direction of the next course of study. It will not be EE; so tired of everything physics this, physics that. It will either be computer engineering or computer science. We shall see. You make this stuff fun again. Yaay Veronica and UA-cam!
I had a Star SG-10 I used on a Commodore then on a PC. It had it over 10 years and it kept on going. I sold it because it was getting hard to find ribbons for it. Me and my sister printed high school and college papers on it, and my brother printed his master's thesis on it. I agree, some of this old technology is still good today, but getting the parts and supplies to keep it running is a problem. In the 1920s, the Germans developed a technology for sending text over radio called Hellschreiber. It used a 7x7 matrix for printing characters and could print characters in any language. It worked very similar to a dot matrix printer. It's on Wikipedia and there are videos on UA-cam of ham radio operators using it. Just amazing how old some technology really is.
The Tally 5040 document printer took me back to one of my first gigs in IT, at a Savings and Loan. We had special printers made by a company called Craden to handle passbooks for savings accounts. They could hold the book flat (like the Tally in the video), and put one line precisely after one printed on a prior customer visit. They cost a bunch: each was laser printer money back in the day (I want to say $5K), and WAAAAY more than the couple-hundred-bucks an Okidata would. The catch was one printer could only be shared by two tellers, as opposed to a LaserJet 4, which, on out NetWare LAN, could be shared by pretty much anyone. My boss was the treasurer of the bank, and regarded passbook savings accounts as something more used by retrogrouches. In part, the infrastructure to support them, such as the printers, were part of the issue. In college, our library had one of the first online card catalogs. My student job was supporting it. We had a bunch of Okis hooked up to DEC dumb terminals. Oh the jams I cleared!
If you're interested, this kind of printers is still widely used for satellite systems on merchant vessels. (those systems are mostly very old though) Even for our regular computers we generally don't use laser printers, but ink jets. The cartridges of the laser printers don't deal well with the vibrations and movement.
The Commodore printer was kinda weird. It didn't have the traditional "rolling pin" type platter. Instead, it was grooved in a triangular pattern. To this day, I don't understand exactly how it worked. I do remember having technical information about its method of printing but I never got around to reading it. And man, it was s-l-o-w as molasses.
I'll never forget the time the beginning of a really long report fell down into the box of paper , and then looped through the printer several times ...
I typed my wife's PhD dissertation into a CPM/86 machine's editor in 1983, and used a dot matrix printer to print the final copy, carefully exploiting the printer's "double-strike" capability to make it look marginally better. I kept an ASCII table close at hand to pick characters for footnotes and formula superscripts that were within the printer's character set, and looked halfway decent. I think the window of accepting dot matrix printed dissertations was pretty narrow, but we squeaked through!
A previous client was researching printers that had multiple drawers for separate paper colors so it could print invoices in multi-color triplicate and quadruplet.
We did that at my workplace to replace our carbonless forms. The only issue has been accepting signatures on multiple copies, which was much easier when the signature carried through.
Reminds me of my weirdest programming job ever. Writing code running _in_ a high-speed matrix printer (this one did an entire band of dots at once)... which converted an IBM-specific printer protocol (think PCL, giving shapes and text and their coordinates on the page) into the rasterized dots (basically a bit-map of where the dots should go). Fun times! :-) And thank you for these fun-filled videos!
You sound just like Technology Connections. Charming I personally would use an old pc with a parallel still on the mother board and just tell it to print whatever it is I want to print. Dot matrix printers are cool. I want one again despite having no real use for it. However my dad told me he used one to print the dos screen on a pc he didn't have a monitor for. Very nice.
Ah dot matrix. It hits that nostalgia button. Through all of elementary school, middle school, and into high school. When printing out something in computer lab, that's the sound I heard. Going back to elementary school in the 80's, it would stop to think. 🤣
I still have my DMP and Colour DMP. Fanfold paper on DMP is great for incremental printing that you don't need to use up a whole page for one line of text. Print to LF then wait for next line. I use to have dasy wheel printer but that wasn't as robust as DMP. Though more things get printed on my thermal printer as it is quiet. I have that for more frequent prints from log files where DMP I use for more immediate issues.
Another alternative to the Jetdirect is the Lantronix EPS1. They are very easy to set using the LPR port on Windows and *nix boxes. You can get them pretty cheap on eBay nowadays since they are "slow" 10baseT devices. I've never had issues with the speed though and I've been driving an older HP LaserJet with one for years. Recently I pulled out an old Epson FX-286e dot matrix out of my mothball archive and have been playing around with lpr. Still works like a charm! I just put in a new ribbon cartridge... its cool to print on the 14-7/8" X 11" retro paper. Nothing like vintage computer noise!
An alternative to the JetDirect is a Raspi configured as an printserver by using a USB to Centronics adapter also. The nice thing about these dot matric printers is, they're almost indestructible.
I have an idea for a followup video about that, actually! I think in some ways that might be better, as the JetDirect is "less than secure" and not very flexible.
I use a wide carriage dot matrix printer for a plotter to make full size patterns for wood working. I also have a black and wight laser printer to print out more complex things that don't need color.
Yes please do this also with gostscript as Printfilter so you can use it as a generic postscript Printer. Would also be usefull for other Printers no longer supported by other Operating Systems ( sometimes You have to support also these ..... )
In the mid naughts, I worked for a company that sold books to libraries already labeled. Our labels were all dot matrix printed. And I can't imagine they replaced them since. If for no other reason than letter sized label sheets are a pain in the butt, and custom size laser is expensive
I still have the same Epson MX-80 F/TIII that I bought in 1983. Still works! Now I've had to go and raid eBay for one of those HP devices. There's nothing like the angry bee sound of a DM printer to make you think you're doing *real* computing.
I used to run a DEC VAX computer, and the boot sequence was always sent to a printer terminal (tty0). We used to look through the paper to see if everything booted cleanly.
I've got a Star LC-10 Colour and a Star LC-20 sat here, in their original boxes, with spare ink ribbons. They were the family printers when I was growing up in the '80s and early '90s. Now I need to work out what to do with 'em. eBay, I suspect. We also had Qume daisy wheel printer (that work a bit like computer controlled typewriters). Not sure what happened to that, it must have failed a few decades ago. Its print quality was amazing, the noise was loud, and it was slow. I never felt it was dusty or messy, but it did have a vinyl dust cover that we re-fitted religiously when it wasn't in use. We had two print wheels for it too, with different "fonts". Courier was the default/go to, but we also had Gill Sans. Young me didn't know anything about type at that point, but I did enjoy both of them. Daisy wheel characters were all the same width, so kerning wasn't an option. But the copy they produced looked great. And the daisy wheel's black ink was actually black, unlike the mid grey that you get out of a dot matrix.
Just picked up a printer, the same printer I used in 1984. I'm eststic. I found it on eeeebay, with original shipping box, manufacturer box, and apparently the docs and cabling. The seller said looks like it's never been used, but he's got no way to test. Omg I said, he wants $30 plus shipping of $20. I grabbed it !! I'll be connecting to my TI-99/4A. A little story..it was 1984 and I found a shaper image store that was selling a legend 880 printer for $1100 and so I made weekly payments and then sometime around year end I paid it off. Wow was I crazy happy! But I'm still crazy to find it on eBay recently..
Dot matrix printers are great. I'm a proud owner of a Epson LQ-100 and are very satisfied with this nearly 30 year old machine. Because i print only like a dozen pages a year and my last (new!) ribbon cartridge costs me only 4 bucks, the price-performance ratio here is unbeatable. And yes, you get it to work easily on Linux. 😅
My daily printer for everyday activities is a Microline 1120, it's got USB although I use it through a PCIe parallel card just cause it's a lot more reliable and doesn't have as much lag time and weirdness. It's plug-n-play, drivers installed by default, on Windows 10 and still supported with replacement parts, new ribbons, etc. and is just plain cheaper than a laser printer, and with the modern drivers it's honestly got a print quality that rivals a cheap laser printer, it's perfectly acceptable for most stuff. Not bad considering I picked this one up on Ebay for 50 bucks, and the price-per-page in ribbons and tractor feed paper is way cheaper than ANY other consumer printer. Easy to fix, replacement parts are still manufactured by Oki and sold at reasonable prices, and extremely reliable, not to mention built like a tank - I heard the thud on the front door when the UPS guy yeeted the box at the front door from 10 feet away... And you're right about them still being quite common in commercial, legal, and industrial settings - I worked at Meijer til 2020 and we had one at the shipping station, every airport I've been to as recently as last year has loads of them at the terminals, and any courthouse or lawyer's office has at least one of them around (including the lawyer I bought my house through last week) so they are FAR from dead technology.
OMG! I remember printing out those multi-page banners for work events and parties. They were the bomb back in the day! Thanks for bringing back those great memories. Now, can you remind me what color printer I used on my C64? some sort of thermal printer?🙂
I personally use Ubuntu LTS as my operating system distribution and older hardware is well supported but when I bought my Brother colour LED printer the operating system automatically recognized it without any input from me. Although it is a newer printer and my Zebra label printer still has to be added manually but isn’t difficult. I noticed you channeled Alec of Technology Connections when talking about the tractor feed for the fanfold paper.
I both miss and don't miss tractor fed dot matrix printers. The wide, green bar paper was handy for program printouts compared to laser printers of today, but I prefer lasers to green bar/tractor fed dot matrix for other things. It just depends on the job.
I have a modern Epson retired from a customer that did forms and still works, since it still has both serial, parallel and USB I think a good project would be to hook it to my old cpc464 or an old dos laptop to do an old school offline writing machine
I actually really like dot matrix printers. I personally didn't realise that they still existed and then in 2014 or 2015 I was tasked with getting the receipt printer replaced as it broke, for the small fuel company I worked for, and I was like "wtf, these still exist". So I went through the relatively painless process of buying one (I think it was an Oki) as to my surprise, our vendors had a few brands and then when it came, the first thing I did was "test" it by printing work-safe ascii art (because you need to test the printers right) and it worked fine on Windows 7. Honestly, I think they were a great piece of tech and i'm sad that they're not used for more things (they're certainly more reliable than newer printers, at that same job we had literally faults with the HP MFPs every goddamn week, this thing had been going for YEARS).
At my mum work they used dot matrix printers to print invoices until mid-2010s, I think? These printers looked similarly to Microline 320 that is on 2:45, but I think they were wider. They stopped using them because developer of software used by them stopped to support dot matrix printing. I remember that they were very noisy. Change definitely had positive effect on their ears.
I had several matrix printers, but now since 2021 stayed with OKI ML3390 and pretty satisfyed with it. I dont need a toner, have no toner-dust in the room, habe nobä expensive ink AND I have a nostalgy))) And for bigger printings (not so often) I have a NEC P7 from 1987 - is old, but prints very good... and am happy with my 2 printers..)) And for some importanter reasons I have a Brother DCP..
I never thought as an IT person I'd enjoy watching a video on a printer. My entire life has been a lie.
Love this! I kept my grandparents awake many nights in high school while I printed papers for English and chemistry class. True Decenders were key to getting the subscripts correct in chemical formulas.
This channel is a gem! Your in-depth technical knowledge is amazing, of course, but what keeps me hooked is the sheer amount of fun you seem to having explaining this stuff.
in the early 90s, i printed the walkthrough for leisure suit larry on my brother's epson printer with continuous paper in dark mode. it had to take 3 passes for each dot. and it didn't print a whole line at a time. it was 2 or maybe 3 parts to a line of text. I think it was a 9-pin head. about 60 pages for the walkthrough. a few days later, i cleared the game and i told my friends in school. they wanted a printout too. mine was too special to me so i didn't give them my copy. i wanted the noise. i needed the noise. so i printed a new copy. i did make the mistake of starting the job at night. my family were soo pissed. i had to lock my room door to prevent them from coming in and turning the damn thing off. those were the days. being 12 and learning to code in turbo pascal. thanks for this video. really took my back there.
Thank you for this. Just last week I scolded a channel host for saying impact printers were "almost non-existent". I've been working on them for 40 years and my company has hundreds of serial- matrix and high-speed shuttle matrix printers under contract around the country. Next they'll be saying flip-phones are outdated...... Geez.
one use I saw with a dot matrix printer was on a security alarm system for the ability to use it as a line-by-line print without the need to throw an entire page. effectively as a teletype or ticker tape system.
When I was a kid in the early 70s, my dad would bring me and my brother into work at the university when he had to go in for a few hours on the weekend. Occasionally that meant a visit to the computer machine room. Once, to keep me entertained, he had an operator make for me a dot matrix print out of the profile of TOS USS Enterprise. It was printed out on probably a dozen or more fan folded large format light green/white striped paper for massive spreadsheets. Made a great banner. After watching your video, I found the university has some photos online of the old computer rooms of that era including one showing a large a dot matrix printer. :)
and I do some end user support for printers where I work. No Dot Matrix. More printer videos like this would be fun. :)
"The printer has a little grippy bit" Yes, this is the technical term for the paper feed. Great video!!!
Awesome 👏 video! I’m subscribing! Can you drill down and do more on these printers 🖨? Can you cover the Panasonic KX-P1123 ?
the little grippy bit is there for her pleasure
fun fact: the print screen key on the keyboard was intent to litetry print all the text that was on screen even the lines that you just have typed in on older DoS machines.
In 1999 i started in the IT world repairing PC's and Oki printers. I setup the 1st uk demo of wireless printing at a huge IT event.
I used to repair Oki printers down to components, loved doing it
Wow... I cannot believe that dot-matrix printers are a now a novelty. In the beginning of my career, I repaired probably thousands of impact printers. Man, I am old!
Apart from multi-part forms and cheques, automotive manufactures still use impact printers (shuttle printers to be specific) for vehicle configuration on the assembly line and for shadow marking labels on body panels. I used to love working on those printers. Such a cool technology!
Thank you for bringing impact printers back to life!
As someone who receives shipments from logistics companies, I see dot matrix printed forms weekly. The bill of lading forms are just like the 1099's, and need to be signed. That's where the multiple copy at once feature of dot matrix comes in handy. Great explanation about how forgotten stuff is still being used now, like how I'm running MVS on my Linux box using QEMU.
I love my dot matrix printer. I seriously use my Tandy DMP-206 weekly, sometimes daily, far more than I use the laser printer. A big part of what I use it for is an old comic collector software for DOS. It does everything I want it to, I can update the database as I wish pretty easily, and it doesn't constantly pester me to pay for some premium version or pay a monthly fee to use the software. The best thing though is that I can print lists of print-runs for whatever comic series I want, or what I usually use it for, printing off separate lists for what I own and what I am missing from a particular run. Because all the pages are connected, it makes a great continuous list that I can fold up and flip through as needed without having to staple pages together or punch them to fit in a binder.
I also use my dot matrix printer to print record sheets for the Battletech board game, which I play usually once a week. I personally find the software for Windows 3.x to be much simpler and easier to use than newer versions and it gives me an excuse to use my DMP-206. In addition, I like to use my DOS computer for creative writing as it gives me a more isolated space without the distractions of having 20 different youtube tabs open, and I can easily print out my stories on my dot matrix printer, and again, don't need to fuss with annoying staples or hole punchers and binders.
My friends think I'm pretty odd for having such enthusiasm for old technology, but I don't care. I love it!
When I worked for the phone company, we had four of these at the office. Three of them were for call completion accounting and one was for diagnostic messages from the switch. They were installed in the 80s and were still working tirelessly the day the center was shut down.
From the UK. I began computing learning U.C.S.D. Pascal in the late 80s on a 8086 PC and dot matrix printers were common place then. Local to me Panasonic sold a lot of them. Great memories. The downside of the inkjets that came next is the rip-off ink prices. From your videos , you have a wide range of knowledge of things I.T., and your videos are interesting and thought provoking. Please continue. Thank You.
Awesome blast from the past. I used Jetdirects to rescue old parallel printers too :) Fun surprise, thank you very much.
It's a ton of fun!!
at that time getting the language specific(french,german, icelandic) characters printed was a bit more challenging than today. also the printer driver wasn't used systemwide and you had to make sure your printer was compatible to a specific model from ibm, nec or epson.
Exactly. Each DOS app needed its own printer driver and usually there was one. Or maybe two. Most printers could emulate multiple generic printer models and hopefully one of them (usually IBM or Epson) worked with your software. The printer needed to be set to the correct emulation using DIP switches.
Most people back then also printed in text mode, something I don't think exists with modern inkjet printers (Laser printers don't ever had it I think, or maybe only really old ones). That means the software only sent raw ASCII to the printer and the font was selected on the printer itself rather than in your word processing software. Obviously that limited your choic of fonts to about 4-6 rather than the dozens and dozens modern apps offer. Actually, Windows 3.x and Apple's System 7 came with only six or so fonts pre-installed, the number of fonts only exploded with Windows 95 and MS Office 97. Later printer drivers selected graphics mode if you printed in high quality (near-letter quality or letter quality as it was called on dot matrix printers) and text mode only if you chose "Draft".
9-pin printers only offered NLQ, 24-pin printers could do LQ, which looks fairly reasonable, especially with a decent ribbon. My Epson LQ-100 produced text that was surprisingly hard to distinguish from early-2000s inkjet printouts with the ribbon I got it with and the printer was nearly free. We used that at school from about 2001-2003 because ink was expensive and would have dried quite quickly as we didn't print a whole lot. Being able to print the occasional homework sheet or other assignment was definitely worth the wait and noise with the dot matrix printer and I don't think anyone ever complained.
Awesome video.
I remember in the early 90's when they were still improving dot matrix printers and making them faster. I'd print out my source code. It was like 500+ pages. I'd need to setup a fan near the printer to keep it from overheating.
A few years ago I bought an old one on eBay and wrote some software to allow my elderly friend who had Parkinsons do his checks. It made it much easier on him.
some did have a cooling fan in the back.
I own two oki’s. The 321 and the 4410. These are wide carriage models. Both have the Ethernet adapter option. Use them mostly to print and review code. Will never let them go! I enjoy any and all content that involves dot matrix printers. Thank you for posting.
These printers are still used in almost all airports in the world. We use them to print documents like passengers informations list, load sheets or flight plans in multiple copies at once. They are very sturdy and the main advantage is that they are very cheap to maintain and you can print a long list on one single page very quickly. At my airport we use the OKI Microline 320 turbo.
haven't owned a printer for 15 years+. Watched video. 20 mins later im looking at prices of Oki Microline 420 printers on ebay. later, im thinking; this lady knows how to make compelling videos! [SUBSCRIBED]
This is a very cool channel! Thanks for the uploads! I was taking care of my dad until a few years ago and in the 80’s he was a CPA and used Banner Mania on his DOS computer. Well, after he retired he would go to the VFW bar and he liked to print out birthday banners but his DOS computer was starting to have issues so I copied the program to a floppy disk 💾 and installed it on a Windows XP system that would run DOS programs and I plugged in his Epson LQ 2550 dot matrix printer. That Epson is a tank and there are plenty of places that still sell ribbons for them so I’d buy a dozen at a time. The paper is easy to get too. Windows 7 won’t run DOS programs btw. The drivers are available online for older models. Btw, those graphics on your sweater from the old print program totally rocks! 😁
Back in the early 2000s I used to have a headless server built into the base of my bookshelf. I had it hooked up to a dot matrix printer in the next room to print bootup error messages and critical log messages. It seemed a lot more convenient than keeping up a constant connection to the server.
This is such a great video and reminds me of my CompTIA A+ certification test. lots of questions about printers and specifically dot matrix printers for some reasons.
My first ever job, was a System Admin for a large Paper Mill. Despite inkjets and laser printers being available, Dot Matrix printers were always used, because they just worked. Love them!
Thank you for sharing. As well as the explanation that while dot matrix may have been a common sight in the 80s to around the mid 90s when inkjet and laser printer came down in price and began to take over, most folks think the dot matrix is a relic from a bygone time. I actually seen them used a couple years ago at Enterprise when I picked up a rental car after my car was totaled in a crash. That was in the summer of 2020 and I had no idea they were still used, last time before that was in the early 2000s, when I was in middle school.
Given the fact they were very reliable and rugged, and the ink ribbon lasts longer and is cheaper than ink cartridges or toner cartridges, and worked good with carbon copy paper, it's only natural they still have their place and time.
Any documentation on older tech is always appreciated to somebody
I absolutely love this channel. Three Kryptonian salutes to you Veronica!!!
I wish dot-matrix were sold retail rather than special order. Though they were less accurate, a $6 ribbon lasted longer than a $28 ink jet cartridge.
I am beginning to research using a dot matrix printer with a microcontroller and found your video. I love all about this video and will dive into your channel now, nerdy female greetings to you and the other peeps involved!
Watching videos like this makes me wonder why I parted with some of my old tech, now that I'm into retro PCs and stuff like that. After my sister no longer wanted her Panasonic dot matrix printer (and it was a beauty), I did her a favor by having it recycled. Sigh. Who knew that we'd be interested in this old hardware again.
I loved my Oki Microline 182 back in the day! I was so amazed when I could use fonts that were not built into the printer using Print Shop
Where I used to work in a pub company our pubs used 3 types of printer. The back office had a colour laser, used for printing menu's and other A4 stuff. The tills had thermal printers to print receipts and orders for the bar etc. The kitchen however has dot matrix receipt printers, this is done as standard as the heat from the kitchen will ruin a thermal roll and the printer tends to get covered in all sorts of grease and powdery food ingredients. That environment would kill a thermal printer or anything else very quickly but the dot matrix printers are way more rugged. They are also extremely accessible allowing the pub staff to perform maintenance including using compressed air to blow the crap out from the mechanism.
I had to replace a couple, usually because the print head was unable to move the ribbon up and down to print either black or red text, it would get stuck on one colour. Something would jam that bit of the mechanism and I never managed to find the time to figure out how to get deep enough in to clean it.
Dot matrix printers are popular at car rental outlets for printing rental contracts on three or four layer carbon-less forms. They are also used for printing passwords or other personal information *inside* sealed envelopes (multipart forms that come with the edges already glued together) on printers with no ribbons installed, or vertical ribbons that are only as wide as the address field.
I repaired one of these today while I didn't know they even existed and it was fun and easy🎉
I am a fan of dot matrix printer now 🙃
I work at a grocery store, part of a large chain nonetheless, and they still use a very similar looking dot matrix printer to yours for printing things when distributors come in. It is interesting to see how these things can be configured. Regardless, these things still apparently have their uses.
As a kid I loved my 386 and dot matrix computer, the parents didn't care how much paper we used as it was cheap to operate.
You absolutely can connect a serial printer to that Haas SL20 (@2:55) and every other Haas lathe/mill/etc. and "punch" (old CNC lingo for punch paper tape) the program out. In fact, you can punch the G-code part program, tool offsets, and machine parameters and a serial printer will be happy to print it for you. No printer driver installation needed. Just need to configure the Haas (or whatever brand of CNC) serial port to match that of what the printer requires. In my 35 years of working on CNC machinery, I've never encountered one that had a parallel port for a printer, but it is (or was) probably out there.
3:24 Perfection. The level of "I didn't have to but I did it anyway" is off the charts~
Oh my god! You sent me back decades! Thank you for this! Veronica is a Time Machine, change my mind!
The cheapest way of connecting an old printer to a modern system is a USB - parallel adaptor. I got mine for a very reasonable price some 15 years ago. It happily ran my ancient Apple LaserWriter and my Epson LQ-100 from then-modern OSs.
A little correction though: at 7:39 the port on the left is an RS-232 serial port and the one on the right is a parallel Centronics port. The latter was by far the most common port for home and office printers in the late 80s through 1990s, eventually replaced by USB. Macs used a much smaller and neater serial RS-422 connections. The plug is quite similar to a PS/2 connector to give you an idea of its size, not much larger than a USB B.
I was told the most common application of impact printers these days is when carbon (less) copies are a legal requirement. If you print multiple copies, there's no technical way of proving they're identical. Carbon copies or carbonless copies are necessarily identical, which is why they're sometimes required for legal paperwork.
Better dot matrix printers could load the paper automatically. Just align the perforation, turn the printer on and press a button (which one depends on your printer model) and the machine automatically loads the paper to the print head. These printers usually also have a "park" feature that unloads the fanfold paper to allow you to print on a single sheet of paper, e.g. office stationery, and once you're done, the printer automatically reloads the fanfold paper. Fun fact: fanfold paper is the only non-metric paper size in Europe that I'm aware of. DIN A4, the most common printer paper size, is 297x210 mm while German standard fanfold is 8 1/2" x 12" (215.9x304.8 mm) because those printers could only move the papers in increments of some fractions of an inch. I just had a look at my old fanfold paper and it's yet another size, I've got two boxes of 240 mm by 12", which is an even weirder mix of measurement units.
Thank you Veronica, for a blast from the past!
I miss my Commodore MPS 801 dot matrix printer. I remember buying it at SEARS. The printer was noisy but much loved. As for modern day use in the industry, an airline or two still use them at the gates. Rock solid performance and reliability for what is asked of them.
I remember my first dot matrix printer - what an upgrade from my ASR 33
Love it. 🥰 I've always been a fan of the dot matrix: the sound, seeing the image form on the paper (unlike the "hidden" magic of lasers, or messy inkjets), and the idea of "robot printing."
Coincidentally, I recently dug out my old Tandy DMP-105 for my Color Computer 2, and decided to connect it to my Windows 11 computer. A USB-to-Parallel adapter and reinked dry ribbon, I was printing text-only documents---I was overjoyed. Magically, a friend also gave me a 25+ year old Okidata 320 with a fresh-in-box ribbon; and this beast prints beautifully & fast (my 105 may be feeling jealous).
Thank You! I I have a 1990? Toshiba ExpressWriter 420 dot matrix printer. When I donated my 1989 HeadStart Explorer XT computer to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain view, CA back in 2012. they did not want this printer that I had used with it. Rather than let them "e-cycle" it as they offered to do, I brought it back home instead, and it has remained n its original box ever since.
Having become involved with collecting and repairing antique & vintage typewriters during the past three years, maybe it's time for me to unbox the Toshiba printer and see if it will come back to life.....😉👍
Great vid! 👍
I worked at Staples in Germany and we had a hand full of customers who orderd dot matrix printer supplies. Turns out, they owned Funeral Homes and print the Ribbons with these Printers.
The oil change place I go to was still using a DOS applicaiton and dot matrix printer (an Epson MX80 IIRC) until recently. They have moved up to Zebra Thermal printer and newer software. The new label printer prints the sticker for the windshield while a Dell laser prints the receipt.
Thank you so much! At 4:33, you hit the nail on the head by validating the use of these machines for making receipts, carbon copies... As a computer geek, EE, a dream is to have a small business. Emailed receipts are great; although, that good old fashioned paper receipt is still the preference of some. Yup, about to subscribe!
As an EE that transitioned from computer engineering early in my matriculation to EE, Power Systems, I will have had a deep desire longing for the computer engineers and scientists' mastery of administration and building of applications. Don't get me wrong, I've programmed microcontrollers and the like and can handle the math of dealing with AC, loss, electromagnetics, blah, blah, blah; however, I found that one of my professors started as an EE. Currently a computer science professor, he still retains his background in EE. His thoughts are a mirror of my own--I had lost something. Sure it was cool to solve physical phenomena and the like with finite element method on clusters and nodes, accelerating code with HPC technology, and sampling a host of other goodies, however, while watching colleagues creating awesome programs and applications! At the end of the master's, writing a thesis, I am conflicted as to the direction of the next course of study. It will not be EE; so tired of everything physics this, physics that. It will either be computer engineering or computer science. We shall see.
You make this stuff fun again. Yaay Veronica and UA-cam!
The passion for this type of technology just shows on your face. This was so cool to watch, I'll be back for more :-)
I had a Star SG-10 I used on a Commodore then on a PC. It had it over 10 years and it kept on going. I sold it because it was getting hard to find ribbons for it. Me and my sister printed high school and college papers on it, and my brother printed his master's thesis on it. I agree, some of this old technology is still good today, but getting the parts and supplies to keep it running is a problem.
In the 1920s, the Germans developed a technology for sending text over radio called Hellschreiber. It used a 7x7 matrix for printing characters and could print characters in any language. It worked very similar to a dot matrix printer. It's on Wikipedia and there are videos on UA-cam of ham radio operators using it. Just amazing how old some technology really is.
The Tally 5040 document printer took me back to one of my first gigs in IT, at a Savings and Loan. We had special printers made by a company called Craden to handle passbooks for savings accounts. They could hold the book flat (like the Tally in the video), and put one line precisely after one printed on a prior customer visit. They cost a bunch: each was laser printer money back in the day (I want to say $5K), and WAAAAY more than the couple-hundred-bucks an Okidata would. The catch was one printer could only be shared by two tellers, as opposed to a LaserJet 4, which, on out NetWare LAN, could be shared by pretty much anyone.
My boss was the treasurer of the bank, and regarded passbook savings accounts as something more used by retrogrouches. In part, the infrastructure to support them, such as the printers, were part of the issue.
In college, our library had one of the first online card catalogs. My student job was supporting it. We had a bunch of Okis hooked up to DEC dumb terminals. Oh the jams I cleared!
If you're interested, this kind of printers is still widely used for satellite systems on merchant vessels. (those systems are mostly very old though) Even for our regular computers we generally don't use laser printers, but ink jets. The cartridges of the laser printers don't deal well with the vibrations and movement.
The sound of the dot matrix evokes so many memories. I still run an FX-850 for printing some stuff, still a very cheap way to print.
I haven't had a dot matrix printer since the 90's for my C=64, but it's good to know how to still use what's out there. Outtakes were good too. 👍
The Commodore printer was kinda weird. It didn't have the traditional "rolling pin" type platter. Instead, it was grooved in a triangular pattern. To this day, I don't understand exactly how it worked. I do remember having technical information about its method of printing but I never got around to reading it. And man, it was s-l-o-w as molasses.
I'll never forget the time the beginning of a really long report fell down into the box of paper , and then looped through the printer several times ...
The worst!!!!
I typed my wife's PhD dissertation into a CPM/86 machine's editor in 1983, and used a dot matrix printer to print the final copy, carefully exploiting the printer's "double-strike" capability to make it look marginally better. I kept an ASCII table close at hand to pick characters for footnotes and formula superscripts that were within the printer's character set, and looked halfway decent. I think the window of accepting dot matrix printed dissertations was pretty narrow, but we squeaked through!
they were obsolete in 1983?
I just discovered you yesterday, and you're awesome. The ending has major Mr. Rogers feels, and your content makes me feel amiga-era Mr. Wizard vibes!
A previous client was researching printers that had multiple drawers for separate paper colors so it could print invoices in multi-color triplicate and quadruplet.
We did that at my workplace to replace our carbonless forms. The only issue has been accepting signatures on multiple copies, which was much easier when the signature carried through.
I have an Oki 320 Turbo! Love these printers!
Reminds me of my weirdest programming job ever. Writing code running _in_ a high-speed matrix printer (this one did an entire band of dots at once)... which converted an IBM-specific printer protocol (think PCL, giving shapes and text and their coordinates on the page) into the rasterized dots (basically a bit-map of where the dots should go). Fun times! :-) And thank you for these fun-filled videos!
You sound just like Technology Connections. Charming
I personally would use an old pc with a parallel still on the mother board and just tell it to print whatever it is I want to print. Dot matrix printers are cool. I want one again despite having no real use for it. However my dad told me he used one to print the dos screen on a pc he didn't have a monitor for. Very nice.
I didn't know anything about dot matrix printers before this video. It might be a relic of the past but it's still amazing.
Ah dot matrix. It hits that nostalgia button. Through all of elementary school, middle school, and into high school. When printing out something in computer lab, that's the sound I heard. Going back to elementary school in the 80's, it would stop to think. 🤣
it's an incomplete life to not experience the dot-matrix printer chugging away - even wore if one's never sniffed a fresh mimeographed paper!
I still have my DMP and Colour DMP. Fanfold paper on DMP is great for incremental printing that you don't need to use up a whole page for one line of text. Print to LF then wait for next line. I use to have dasy wheel printer but that wasn't as robust as DMP. Though more things get printed on my thermal printer as it is quiet. I have that for more frequent prints from log files where DMP I use for more immediate issues.
Thank you Veronica, I can now print out my error logs into scrolls.
Dot matrix printers are so nostalgic for me. So fascinated with them when I was a kid.
Wonderful. Now I just need to get my GPIB connected printer going again.
Another alternative to the Jetdirect is the Lantronix EPS1. They are very easy to set using the LPR port on Windows and *nix boxes. You can get them pretty cheap on eBay nowadays since they are "slow" 10baseT devices. I've never had issues with the speed though and I've been driving an older HP LaserJet with one for years. Recently I pulled out an old Epson FX-286e dot matrix out of my mothball archive and have been playing around with lpr. Still works like a charm! I just put in a new ribbon cartridge... its cool to print on the 14-7/8" X 11" retro paper. Nothing like vintage computer noise!
An alternative to the JetDirect is a Raspi configured as an printserver by using a USB to Centronics adapter also. The nice thing about these dot matric printers is, they're almost indestructible.
I have an idea for a followup video about that, actually! I think in some ways that might be better, as the JetDirect is "less than secure" and not very flexible.
Those oki are so well built. I used to fix them in the late 80s
The business I work for has several dot matrix printers and they are still heavily used today. The mighty Dot matrix is far from dead.
I use a wide carriage dot matrix printer for a plotter to make full size patterns for wood working.
I also have a black and wight laser printer to print out more complex things that don't need color.
great! I started out using DecWriters to do programming as a long-time DEC contractor.
I'd be interested to see if a parallel/centronics to USB adapter + raspberrypi (or any) print server would work with the printer
rpi zero does not have the lpadmin group, maybe the other models do
Yes please do this also with gostscript as Printfilter so you can use it as a generic postscript Printer.
Would also be usefull for other Printers no longer supported by other Operating Systems ( sometimes You have to support also these ..... )
In the mid naughts, I worked for a company that sold books to libraries already labeled. Our labels were all dot matrix printed. And I can't imagine they replaced them since. If for no other reason than letter sized label sheets are a pain in the butt, and custom size laser is expensive
Also, I need that sweater 😂
I still have the same Epson MX-80 F/TIII that I bought in 1983. Still works! Now I've had to go and raid eBay for one of those HP devices. There's nothing like the angry bee sound of a DM printer to make you think you're doing *real* computing.
I used to run a DEC VAX computer, and the boot sequence was always sent to a printer terminal (tty0). We used to look through the paper to see if everything booted cleanly.
I just found you, and I am not disappointed!
Very excited to see more Dot matrix videos, very cool
I've got a Star LC-10 Colour and a Star LC-20 sat here, in their original boxes, with spare ink ribbons. They were the family printers when I was growing up in the '80s and early '90s. Now I need to work out what to do with 'em. eBay, I suspect.
We also had Qume daisy wheel printer (that work a bit like computer controlled typewriters). Not sure what happened to that, it must have failed a few decades ago. Its print quality was amazing, the noise was loud, and it was slow. I never felt it was dusty or messy, but it did have a vinyl dust cover that we re-fitted religiously when it wasn't in use. We had two print wheels for it too, with different "fonts". Courier was the default/go to, but we also had Gill Sans. Young me didn't know anything about type at that point, but I did enjoy both of them. Daisy wheel characters were all the same width, so kerning wasn't an option. But the copy they produced looked great. And the daisy wheel's black ink was actually black, unlike the mid grey that you get out of a dot matrix.
Just picked up a printer, the same printer I used in 1984. I'm eststic. I found it on eeeebay, with original shipping box, manufacturer box, and apparently the docs and cabling. The seller said looks like it's never been used, but he's got no way to test. Omg I said, he wants $30 plus shipping of $20. I grabbed it !! I'll be connecting to my TI-99/4A.
A little story..it was 1984 and I found a shaper image store that was selling a legend 880 printer for $1100 and so I made weekly payments and then sometime around year end I paid it off. Wow was I crazy happy!
But I'm still crazy to find it on eBay recently..
(07:34) FunFACT: that mini din connector is an RS-422 serial port for Sun, SGI, and Macintosh computers.
Dot matrix printers are great. I'm a proud owner of a Epson LQ-100 and are very satisfied with this nearly 30 year old machine. Because i print only like a dozen pages a year and my last (new!) ribbon cartridge costs me only 4 bucks, the price-performance ratio here is unbeatable.
And yes, you get it to work easily on Linux. 😅
My daily printer for everyday activities is a Microline 1120, it's got USB although I use it through a PCIe parallel card just cause it's a lot more reliable and doesn't have as much lag time and weirdness. It's plug-n-play, drivers installed by default, on Windows 10 and still supported with replacement parts, new ribbons, etc. and is just plain cheaper than a laser printer, and with the modern drivers it's honestly got a print quality that rivals a cheap laser printer, it's perfectly acceptable for most stuff. Not bad considering I picked this one up on Ebay for 50 bucks, and the price-per-page in ribbons and tractor feed paper is way cheaper than ANY other consumer printer. Easy to fix, replacement parts are still manufactured by Oki and sold at reasonable prices, and extremely reliable, not to mention built like a tank - I heard the thud on the front door when the UPS guy yeeted the box at the front door from 10 feet away... And you're right about them still being quite common in commercial, legal, and industrial settings - I worked at Meijer til 2020 and we had one at the shipping station, every airport I've been to as recently as last year has loads of them at the terminals, and any courthouse or lawyer's office has at least one of them around (including the lawyer I bought my house through last week) so they are FAR from dead technology.
OMG! I remember printing out those multi-page banners for work events and parties. They were the bomb back in the day! Thanks for bringing back those great memories. Now, can you remind me what color printer I used on my C64? some sort of thermal printer?🙂
Guessing you used the Okidata Okimate 10. At least that is the one I remember.
@@BigPineappleRex Yes!! That's the one I used to own. Took about an hour to download an image and then another hour to print it. Great times. Thanks!
I personally use Ubuntu LTS as my operating system distribution and older hardware is well supported but when I bought my Brother colour LED printer the operating system automatically recognized it without any input from me. Although it is a newer printer and my Zebra label printer still has to be added manually but isn’t difficult. I noticed you channeled Alec of Technology Connections when talking about the tractor feed for the fanfold paper.
I've loved the way that you explains things
I both miss and don't miss tractor fed dot matrix printers. The wide, green bar paper was handy for program printouts compared to laser printers of today, but I prefer lasers to green bar/tractor fed dot matrix for other things. It just depends on the job.
when she said "linux is awesome and so are you"
I felt that 😌
Love your unique videos
I have a modern Epson retired from a customer that did forms and still works, since it still has both serial, parallel and USB I think a good project would be to hook it to my old cpc464 or an old dos laptop to do an old school offline writing machine
I actually really like dot matrix printers. I personally didn't realise that they still existed and then in 2014 or 2015 I was tasked with getting the receipt printer replaced as it broke, for the small fuel company I worked for, and I was like "wtf, these still exist". So I went through the relatively painless process of buying one (I think it was an Oki) as to my surprise, our vendors had a few brands and then when it came, the first thing I did was "test" it by printing work-safe ascii art (because you need to test the printers right) and it worked fine on Windows 7.
Honestly, I think they were a great piece of tech and i'm sad that they're not used for more things (they're certainly more reliable than newer printers, at that same job we had literally faults with the HP MFPs every goddamn week, this thing had been going for YEARS).
At my mum work they used dot matrix printers to print invoices until mid-2010s, I think? These printers looked similarly to Microline 320 that is on 2:45, but I think they were wider. They stopped using them because developer of software used by them stopped to support dot matrix printing. I remember that they were very noisy. Change definitely had positive effect on their ears.
I have so many memories of printing to a Star ribbon printer using Banner Mania.
It's used by tatoo artists also, as the pins are used to mark carbon paper.
i scrapped 3 of them- they have a load of good parts for projects!!!
More videos like this please! Like why do we still use calculators with a dot matrix printers. or a history lesson of how adding machines worked
I had several matrix printers, but now since 2021 stayed with OKI ML3390 and pretty satisfyed with it. I dont need a toner, have no toner-dust in the room, habe nobä expensive ink AND I have a nostalgy))) And for bigger printings (not so often) I have a NEC P7 from 1987 - is old, but prints very good... and am happy with my 2 printers..))
And for some importanter reasons I have a Brother DCP..