In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation). It had a Z80 microprocessor and ran CP/M. As was true of many hobbyist computers from this era, it came with full source code (in beautifully documented assembly) both for CP/M and for the BIOS. This was important because if you wanted to add peripherals or make other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS.
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.
Can I humbly suggest that you dig that letter out and get it framed? Random pieces of paper tend to go astray during moves and clear-outs; framed items less so.
Thanks for the nice anecdote.
I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.
Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
Oh that really hurts. That would be an amazing memento.
On the other hand if you don't show some restraint you end up being buried in paper and lugging way too much of it around--which I did when I was younger.
I was reading some of the Amiga 1000 material that was surfacing earlier this summer for the 40th anniversary - the Infoworld review ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=cC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&redir_... ) had the following highlight:
"Connecting printers is equally easy, since the Amiga uses standard plugs and cabling schemes used by the IBM PC; you can actually unplug an Epson dot-matrix printer from an IBM PC, plug it into an Amiga, and expect it to work without rewiring the cable"
I love that this was worth mentioning in 1985.
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.
Great story!
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.
If I remember correctly the serial port was an add-in card. Mine used the parallel connection.
Thank you for making us travel back into a pre internet era of the 70-80s.
That’s a wonderful story, thank you for sharing
This is the true definition of Plug-and-Play.
> In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation).
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.
Something isn't right with this, though. I don't remember if there was a "wide" mode, but this font, while it feels very accurate, is somehow stretched wider than what would have been default. Here's an image of something from an MX-80 that looks more like what I remember: https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson2.png
(taken from https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix). Still, thanks for sharing this!
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
Ah, so the characters we’re seeing here are twice as wide as they would be when printed? Adding some CSS to compress the page horizontally looks a lot closer to the first image you shared:
html {
transform: scaleX(50%);
}
The font on the page is definitely too wide -- it should be taller than wide, and 10 characters per inch.
I'm not sure the original MX-80 had square dots. Since they made this to be pixel accurate, the aspect ratio might be off because the MX-80 was off.
The key test is not how it looks on screen, but how it looks printed.
My recollection is that the dots were round on my dot matrix. But it also used a typewriter ribbon, so there was a bit of texture from that.
Good point, the dots were produced by pins that were round. What I meant to say was that the spacing might have been different in the two directions.
I played with it a bit and 65% or so seemed more accurate to my memories
I usually printed my listings etc. with "condensed" fonts. They looked very nice. Even so, I can't remember that the non-condensed fonts should look that wide, when looking at the web page.. I remember something kind of like that, but not the standard mode.
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..
Thanks, I was immediately wondering what was wrong with that web page as I never had such wide fonts coming out on paper.
I remember my Star LC-10 had multiple fonts with different widths. There was regular, condensed, wide and NLQ (Near Letter Quality). The latter looked like it had been written on a typewriter.
I had a Star SG-10, labeled as "Epson Compatible". (Mostly)
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.
Star Micronics Gemini-10X to Xetec Super Graphix interface card to C64. The bane of my existence seemed to get the sprockets synced and eventually started wrinkling the paper after a few pages.
Ahh, thank you for solving the mystery. Personally I think they should put some text on this page fixed with CSS to demonstrate this.
It was a 1 x 9 print head and you could get 132 characters per line as well as the normal 80, plus variants such as 40 and 66 characters per line, where things must have been doubled up with the motor running at the same pitch, hence the 12x9 you refer to.
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 got the Graftrax option for my MX-80 so it could do arbitrary graphics without having to mess around with special characters.
A lot of people never saw anything different come out of these printers.
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.
>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.)
I have pleasant memories of using SpeedScript on my C64 to write several papers in high school. What an amazing piece of software: a word processor in 5 KB.
You are right. I bought (well my parents did) and it came with a complimentary upgrade. We installed the chip and it was great but the driver was not universal so it printed out with a slow stretch so the lines would go downward on the right side. We took it back for tech support and it turned out it was a software issue. My first lesson in debugging goes up the stack. (I was like 13 I think)
I replaced my Okidata ML92 with a Fujitsu DL-3800 and got a huge bump in quality when printing from Word 2.0 on Windows. The only downside was that if I finished a paper after about 10pm I had to wait until morning to print or I would wake the whole house up.
The 24 needles of my Epson LQ-400 were loud enough to be heard when I rode my bicycle along the street past the property. Convenient to know when a print job finished[1] but basically made the house inhabitable for the time.
[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.
The worst for me were those budget 'one hammer' printers with a revolving bar of single lines where the dots would appear. Those really made a racket.
All of these were handily outdone by chainprinters in the datacenter but those were in a soundproofed box.
I had an FX-80 and although you could print your True Type fonts on it (from Windows 3.1 onwards) it would chew through the ribbon and the print head would get very hot.
In a computer lab in a university in Greece in the '80s...
we had a Star NL-10 connected to a Vax 11/750 running BSD Unix.
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!
> 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.
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.
People were printing cards and signs in graphics mode from printers like the FX-80 years before Windows 3.1, from software like The Print Shop. Or, from any word processor if they owned a Mac.
Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!
I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.
From memory, I think we put ours (an FX80 rather than the MX80) in a box to keep the sound down. It was used with an [HP86](https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
They sold boxes specifically for that.
I think they were mandatory for Doctors medical practices after some point in Germany.
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.
Offices which had typewriters or daisy-wheel printers beforehand were actually somewhat relieved by the "soothing" high-pitched sounds when they got dot-matrix.
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 ;)
Reminds me of visits to the print room at university. Down the far end of the hallway because even with the special sound proof door you could still hear it. The line printers for the VAX were proper industrial machinery.
When the first laser printers appeared we - the people using high end line printers - thought they were slow. That didn't last for more than two years at which point the laser printers handily outstripped the line printers in terms of speed and print quality. They were still massive (that too changed quickly) but not as massive (or as impressive) as a line printer.
The speed with which a properly adjusted lineprinter would eat through a full box of green-white sprocket feed printer paper was very impressive.
I had a line of freshman out my dorm room door in college because I was one of three kids with a PC in my dorm and the only one with a printer. My good ol epson mx80. I charged each procrastinator a beer for last minute print jobs because the computer center was a 20 minute walk from the dorms. I drank a lot that year. But the funny part is the vast majority of engineering and compsci students didn’t have a personal computer. Let that sink in.
Maybe there's something I don't understand, but I think "broken bar" should be a broken bar, and "vertical line" should be a vertical line, rather than the reverse.
>For best results, it is recommended to use these fonts with the following color
scheme (as used here on this web page):
> Foreground: black (#000000) (Ink)
> Background: white (#FFFFFF) (Paper)
What about the alternating green bars? And the perforation?
And even the newest ink ribbons were not that black.
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.
adjust colours to taste :) extra credit if you implement dark mode!
This makes me nostalgic for my family's Roland DG printer (although the text looks too wide). But I remember at the time never being satisfied with the quality, wanting a colour 24-pin or a laser printer. Still, I made full use of that thing, with papers in WordPerfect and cards and banners in The Print Shop.
I used to have an old dot matrix printer with my PC in the 90s from my dad. Of course it was also possible to put in "normal" paper as the top unit was removable and print with ttf fonts. My mom liked the printing of the dot matrix printer much more though than the inkjet I later had. (Not sure though if it was an MX-80 or a later model/edition)
From the page: The EPSON MX-80 printer was a commercially successful product in the early 1980s.
That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
> That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
Something that I forgot to add was that with early TRS-80's and PC's the computer was "frozen" while it sent the job to the printer.
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.
(looking at the "RX-80" box sitting next to my desk that contains student memories) This is a cool website, thanks for making this!
Ah, yes, the EPSON MX-80. Majestically noisy.
The MX-80 was a wonderful piece of hardware, all function. It was tractor fed but had a regular platen so you could line up letterhead with friction feed. No drama about low ink or something warming up or some bad encoding or another transfer failed. Bytes in, paper out!
We had an Apple II around 1980 and a friend helped us make a parallel cable for it.
But not as noisy as a daisy wheel. Those things sounded like machine gun fire.
Back in elementary school, I wrote a font editor for the FX- cousins of these printers. Good times!
[deleted]
This is a time travel to the 1980s.
In the early 1980s there was a CP/M and MS-DOS program called Fancy Font that worked with Epson MX-80 printers. When you put the printer in graphics mode, it can position the pixels vertically with distances as small as 1/3 of the distance between pins. I'm not sure whether it moves the platen or moves the pins within the print head, but the upshot is that with 8 pins available in graphics mode, with 3 passes of the print head you can get 24 pixels of vertical resolution in one line.
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.
Dad's automotive shop had an Okidata Microline 192 Plus 9-pin printer to print work orders on carbonless copy paper. Damn, that thing was loud.
And tearing perforated sheets from the edges without tearing the pages. Always fun, especially on cheap paper. And, it had that chemical smell.
In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation). It had a Z80 microprocessor and ran CP/M. As was true of many hobbyist computers from this era, it came with full source code (in beautifully documented assembly) both for CP/M and for the BIOS. This was important because if you wanted to add peripherals or make other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS.
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.
Can I humbly suggest that you dig that letter out and get it framed? Random pieces of paper tend to go astray during moves and clear-outs; framed items less so.
Thanks for the nice anecdote.
I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.
Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
Oh that really hurts. That would be an amazing memento.
On the other hand if you don't show some restraint you end up being buried in paper and lugging way too much of it around--which I did when I was younger.
I was reading some of the Amiga 1000 material that was surfacing earlier this summer for the 40th anniversary - the Infoworld review ( https://books.google.ca/books?id=cC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42&redir_... ) had the following highlight: "Connecting printers is equally easy, since the Amiga uses standard plugs and cabling schemes used by the IBM PC; you can actually unplug an Epson dot-matrix printer from an IBM PC, plug it into an Amiga, and expect it to work without rewiring the cable" I love that this was worth mentioning in 1985.
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.
Great story!
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.
If I remember correctly the serial port was an add-in card. Mine used the parallel connection.
Thank you for making us travel back into a pre internet era of the 70-80s.
That’s a wonderful story, thank you for sharing
This is the true definition of Plug-and-Play.
> In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation).
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.
Something isn't right with this, though. I don't remember if there was a "wide" mode, but this font, while it feels very accurate, is somehow stretched wider than what would have been default. Here's an image of something from an MX-80 that looks more like what I remember: https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson2.png (taken from https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix). Still, thanks for sharing this!
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
Ah, so the characters we’re seeing here are twice as wide as they would be when printed? Adding some CSS to compress the page horizontally looks a lot closer to the first image you shared:
The font on the page is definitely too wide -- it should be taller than wide, and 10 characters per inch.
I'm not sure the original MX-80 had square dots. Since they made this to be pixel accurate, the aspect ratio might be off because the MX-80 was off.
The key test is not how it looks on screen, but how it looks printed.
My recollection is that the dots were round on my dot matrix. But it also used a typewriter ribbon, so there was a bit of texture from that.
Good point, the dots were produced by pins that were round. What I meant to say was that the spacing might have been different in the two directions.
I played with it a bit and 65% or so seemed more accurate to my memories
I usually printed my listings etc. with "condensed" fonts. They looked very nice. Even so, I can't remember that the non-condensed fonts should look that wide, when looking at the web page.. I remember something kind of like that, but not the standard mode.
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..
Thanks, I was immediately wondering what was wrong with that web page as I never had such wide fonts coming out on paper.
Never? There definitely was a double-width feature on those printers, as demonstrated in the manual: https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers...
I remember my Star LC-10 had multiple fonts with different widths. There was regular, condensed, wide and NLQ (Near Letter Quality). The latter looked like it had been written on a typewriter.
I had a Star SG-10, labeled as "Epson Compatible". (Mostly)
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.
Star Micronics Gemini-10X to Xetec Super Graphix interface card to C64. The bane of my existence seemed to get the sprockets synced and eventually started wrinkling the paper after a few pages.
Ahh, thank you for solving the mystery. Personally I think they should put some text on this page fixed with CSS to demonstrate this.
It was a 1 x 9 print head and you could get 132 characters per line as well as the normal 80, plus variants such as 40 and 66 characters per line, where things must have been doubled up with the motor running at the same pitch, hence the 12x9 you refer to.
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 got the Graftrax option for my MX-80 so it could do arbitrary graphics without having to mess around with special characters.
A lot of people never saw anything different come out of these printers.
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.
>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.)
I have pleasant memories of using SpeedScript on my C64 to write several papers in high school. What an amazing piece of software: a word processor in 5 KB.
I don't think the original Epson ROM on the MX-80 had a graphics mode. I think that was a feature added by the Graftrax-80 ROM: https://archive.org/details/Graftrax-80_1981_Epson_America/m...
You are right. I bought (well my parents did) and it came with a complimentary upgrade. We installed the chip and it was great but the driver was not universal so it printed out with a slow stretch so the lines would go downward on the right side. We took it back for tech support and it turned out it was a software issue. My first lesson in debugging goes up the stack. (I was like 13 I think)
I replaced my Okidata ML92 with a Fujitsu DL-3800 and got a huge bump in quality when printing from Word 2.0 on Windows. The only downside was that if I finished a paper after about 10pm I had to wait until morning to print or I would wake the whole house up.
The 24 needles of my Epson LQ-400 were loud enough to be heard when I rode my bicycle along the street past the property. Convenient to know when a print job finished[1] but basically made the house inhabitable for the time.
[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.
The worst for me were those budget 'one hammer' printers with a revolving bar of single lines where the dots would appear. Those really made a racket.
All of these were handily outdone by chainprinters in the datacenter but those were in a soundproofed box.
I had an FX-80 and although you could print your True Type fonts on it (from Windows 3.1 onwards) it would chew through the ribbon and the print head would get very hot.
In a computer lab in a university in Greece in the '80s... we had a Star NL-10 connected to a Vax 11/750 running BSD Unix.
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!
> 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.
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.
People were printing cards and signs in graphics mode from printers like the FX-80 years before Windows 3.1, from software like The Print Shop. Or, from any word processor if they owned a Mac.
Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!
I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.
From memory, I think we put ours (an FX80 rather than the MX80) in a box to keep the sound down. It was used with an [HP86](https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
They sold boxes specifically for that.
I think they were mandatory for Doctors medical practices after some point in Germany.
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.
Offices which had typewriters or daisy-wheel printers beforehand were actually somewhat relieved by the "soothing" high-pitched sounds when they got dot-matrix.
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 ;)
Reminds me of visits to the print room at university. Down the far end of the hallway because even with the special sound proof door you could still hear it. The line printers for the VAX were proper industrial machinery.
When the first laser printers appeared we - the people using high end line printers - thought they were slow. That didn't last for more than two years at which point the laser printers handily outstripped the line printers in terms of speed and print quality. They were still massive (that too changed quickly) but not as massive (or as impressive) as a line printer.
The speed with which a properly adjusted lineprinter would eat through a full box of green-white sprocket feed printer paper was very impressive.
I had a line of freshman out my dorm room door in college because I was one of three kids with a PC in my dorm and the only one with a printer. My good ol epson mx80. I charged each procrastinator a beer for last minute print jobs because the computer center was a 20 minute walk from the dorms. I drank a lot that year. But the funny part is the vast majority of engineering and compsci students didn’t have a personal computer. Let that sink in.
Maybe there's something I don't understand, but I think "broken bar" should be a broken bar, and "vertical line" should be a vertical line, rather than the reverse.
>For best results, it is recommended to use these fonts with the following color scheme (as used here on this web page):
> Foreground: black (#000000) (Ink) > Background: white (#FFFFFF) (Paper)
What about the alternating green bars? And the perforation?
And even the newest ink ribbons were not that black.
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.
> What about the alternating green bars?
adjust colours to taste :) extra credit if you implement dark mode!This makes me nostalgic for my family's Roland DG printer (although the text looks too wide). But I remember at the time never being satisfied with the quality, wanting a colour 24-pin or a laser printer. Still, I made full use of that thing, with papers in WordPerfect and cards and banners in The Print Shop.
I used to have an old dot matrix printer with my PC in the 90s from my dad. Of course it was also possible to put in "normal" paper as the top unit was removable and print with ttf fonts. My mom liked the printing of the dot matrix printer much more though than the inkjet I later had. (Not sure though if it was an MX-80 or a later model/edition)
From the page: The EPSON MX-80 printer was a commercially successful product in the early 1980s.
That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
> That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
"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>
Something that I forgot to add was that with early TRS-80's and PC's the computer was "frozen" while it sent the job to the printer.
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.
(looking at the "RX-80" box sitting next to my desk that contains student memories) This is a cool website, thanks for making this!
Ah, yes, the EPSON MX-80. Majestically noisy.
The MX-80 was a wonderful piece of hardware, all function. It was tractor fed but had a regular platen so you could line up letterhead with friction feed. No drama about low ink or something warming up or some bad encoding or another transfer failed. Bytes in, paper out!
We had an Apple II around 1980 and a friend helped us make a parallel cable for it.
But not as noisy as a daisy wheel. Those things sounded like machine gun fire.
Back in elementary school, I wrote a font editor for the FX- cousins of these printers. Good times!
This is a time travel to the 1980s.
In the early 1980s there was a CP/M and MS-DOS program called Fancy Font that worked with Epson MX-80 printers. When you put the printer in graphics mode, it can position the pixels vertically with distances as small as 1/3 of the distance between pins. I'm not sure whether it moves the platen or moves the pins within the print head, but the upshot is that with 8 pins available in graphics mode, with 3 passes of the print head you can get 24 pixels of vertical resolution in one line.
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.
Dad's automotive shop had an Okidata Microline 192 Plus 9-pin printer to print work orders on carbonless copy paper. Damn, that thing was loud.
And tearing perforated sheets from the edges without tearing the pages. Always fun, especially on cheap paper. And, it had that chemical smell.
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