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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Another oddity re. the ImageWriter. There was even a color ribbon for the printer as I recall. The early Mac, even though black and white, had some very primitive color attributes buried in the "Mac Toolbox" (ROM) that, while not allowing you to display color on those devices, could in fact send simple color to the ImageWriter with said ribbon.

I feel like MacDraw (or some other lesser-known app — not MacPaint) exposed this functionality.

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I remember feeling like the color ribbon was so eye-wateringly expensive that we bought *one* and kept it in a zip lock bag except when we wanted a color print. Usually from The Print Shop. I was young (aged 10 - 15), and it probably wasn't really that expensive. My parents were willing to help with equipment, but we had to pay for consumables ourselves. So any ink, floppies, telephone fees for dialing into BBSs were on us, and we were as stingy about them as you'd expect from kids with limited opportunities to earn money.

I vaguely remember that AppleWriter on the Apple IIe exposed the escape sequence it used for character-mode print commands like bold and underline to the user. You could change the command to escape sequence maps right from inside the program. I re-mapped bold to cyan, and underline to magenta just to see magic color come from that printer. That one day in 1996 was probably the only time that printer ever printed in color, and probably my first time to see a printer print in color.

There are still people making reproduction ImageWriter color ribbon cartridges for retrocomputing enthusiasts! https://maceffects.com/products/apple-imagewriter-ii-color-r...

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