A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.
Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.
Thanks for the nice anecdote.
Similar story, a bit later - my parents had a TeleVideo 1603 system that ran CP/M - I remember my father making a custom cable to connect a Daisywriter letter quality printer to it.
sorry to hijack your thread but this brought up something i hadn't thought about in a while.
when i was a kid getting into computers, say around 96/97, and for a while after that, i always felt a sense of missing out for not having been born earlier in the personal computing revolution, to really get access to what i felt was the ground floor of computer technology.
but then i got older and realized there's no way my single, non-technical, minimum-wage-earning mom could have paid 70s/80s hardware prices for machines.
given the situation i was born into, i now think i was extremely lucky - just early enough to be heavily influenced by early modern computing, but with relatively modern used hardware becoming more accessible to more people.
I faced some problems in the old world of computers, but none as fun as this. I've always felt that computing was a lot more visceral back then because we were operating much closer to the machine.
Nowadays, software development is mostly about struggling against other humans: trying to undestand other people's mental models when patching libraries and APIs together. Back in the day, it was man vs machine.
EDIT: Now I know what the issue is! Per the link above: "Like other impact printers, the Epson series of dot matrix printers used a 6x9 grid to arrange the dots for each letter. Dots could also be printed halfway between each vertical line on the grid, effectively providing a higher resolution of 12x9 for each printed character." Here's an illustration: https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson1.png
html {
transform: scaleX(50%);
}The key test is not how it looks on screen, but how it looks printed.
I only became familiar with the later FX-80, which was the same but different. I managed to get logos printed along with neat boxes around information from the extra characters it had in PCL.
I am sure NLQ was a selling point of the FX-80 but I would like to see how good it was on the MX-80. At the time printers from Epson, HP and Canon were miracles of engineering, more advanced than the computers they were connected to.
I have an OKI Epson-compatible matrix printer somewhere in the man cave. The last time I printed anything on one was a Snoopy calendar generated by the Snoopy Calendar Fortran program. If I ever get the mess in the cave sorted out I'll get that printer hooked up again, to something. The 80's mini maybe..
The Near Letter Quality was essentially double struck by making a second pass at a slight offset, with the corresponding increase in noise and print times.
There wasn't support for the printer in AppleWorks, so my first useful program was a BASIC thing that you could set the font in the printer and then reboot into AppleWorks to use either the 10 cpi, 12, 17(condensed) or the NLQ setting.
These are built-in fonts available so the simplest devices/OS like DOS can directly print per-character (ASCII) rather than per-pixel or per-dot. You send it the signal to print an upper case letter for instance, it responds and prints the upper case letter about like a daisy-wheel printer would have done. No dots involved in the communication between the PC and the printer, other than the trigger that makes it print the right letter on the paper.
Printing per-dot was graphics mode, the PC has to send every single dot to the printer but that's what you need for real pictures.
After a while fonts appeared which you loaded in the PC, which would then send every one of their dots to the printer in graphics mode, so there was a lot fancier text output available. But it was fiddly and didn't always work right, and by that time there were newer printers having lots of those typewriter-style fonts built in. Those who couldn't get the fonts installed into their PC correctly, for the old MX and FX printers to print all fancy like the few real geeks were doing, just got a new printer instead and their office correspondence went from these bare-bones Epson fonts to pseudo-letter-quality just plugging in the new printer.
Windows 3.1 made it a little easier to get the auxiliary DOS fonts going, but people mostly had gotten newer printers by then.
By the time Windows 95 came out very few of these old printers were still being used, but there were plenty of True-Type fonts built into Windows by then, plus the built-in drivers for such old printers were very mature.
So it was never really very common knowledge, but you could just plug MX-80 series in to Windows 9x and pick any of the same fonts as you would for a laser printer, and it went bi-directional laying down overlapping dots like Adobe bricks, near-letter-quality enough to where they could hardly tell the difference once you faxed the page to somebody.
I am happy to report that I was doing the same thing in 1986 with GEOS on Commodore 64! And again in 1990 with PC/GEOS on Tandy 1000!
(Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
[1] I was going to write "or failed" but I could not remember it ever did. The continuous paper with the tractor feed was quite reliable.
All of these were handily outdone by chainprinters in the datacenter but those were in a soundproofed box.
We were using nroff(1) to typeset and print documents, using the printer built-in fonts.
And then at some point we wrote the driver so that troff(1) (which was actually ditroff, for "device-independent" troff), could generate output that set the printer in high-resolution mode and essentially printed pre-rendered bitmaps of lines.
Oh, the memories!
It also had to send every non-dot. If you were lucky you might be able to economize if a whole line was blank past a certain point. But initially there was no way to avoid sending the whole bitmap.
There the Epsons were called the "Ärztedrucker" because Doctors they used them for "carbon copy" prescriptions. Even after Laser- or Inkjetprinters were common. No carbon copy possible there. And they had to be carbon copied, for legal reasons.
The background sound resembling constant dental drilling was actually fairly painless compared to the volley of machine-gun fire that multiple high-impact printers could be sending across the room from different parts of the office.
Could be why they invented Tylenol ;)
The speed with which a properly adjusted lineprinter would eat through a full box of green-white sprocket feed printer paper was very impressive.
Fancy Font rendered marked-up text on the computer using one or more of the supplied, or user-created, proportional bitmap fonts, and then used this technique in the Epson's graphics mode to print out very high quality (for an Epson MX-80), proportionally spaced, "typeset" text. Many a church newsletter and the like were rendered in Fancy Font at the dawn of the 1980s, and the program even received support for those new-fangled, high-resolution "laser printers" in its latter days, but as the Macintosh and other GUI-based WYSIWYG desktop publishing solutions became ascendant, Fancy Font faded into memory.
> Foreground: black (#000000) (Ink) > Background: white (#FFFFFF) (Paper)
What about the alternating green bars? And the perforation?
And the dots were never so crispy and individually formed on real paper.
And as discussed above, everything is far too wide. The dots blended together and created diagonals at least a little bit; thats not reflected here.
body {
background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, white 0%, white 1em, #7cb8a6 1em, #7cb8a6 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 2px));
background-size: 100% calc(2em + 2px);
}And tearing perforated sheets from the edges without tearing the pages. Always fun, especially on cheap paper. And, it had that chemical smell.
That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
Most entry-level printers didn't have enough internal memory for more than a few pages.
Which was fine for everybody that only printed a page or two, but for those who needed printouts of dozens of pages this would take a long time because the printer had such little memory.
So eventually the external print buffers appeared which connected between the PC and the printer so you could go back to DOS without waiting while the printer sat there chewing through fanfold paper.
"I doubt we'll ever bomb Japan as long as they make Epson printers" —Woz, 1983 <https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19>
We had an Apple II around 1980 and a friend helped us make a parallel cable for it.