MX-80 – Ahead of its time: A small, lightweight computer printer
global.epson.com
global.epson.com
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 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo
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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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.