Dot matrix printers.
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
They still use them to print pizza labels at Domino's. I think they still hand toss the pizzas there, and what that means is that the place is constantly filled with flour dust (I personally think it's a health hazard, that's how bad it is) - anyway, the only printers that last more than a few days are the dot matrix type. Inkjets fail quickly in that environment.
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
"What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro." In the late 1960s the Satellite Test Center in Sunnyvale used what I think were IBM 1401 line-at-a-time drum printers. You heard a painful BRRAPP with each line printed. Lead-foil lined plywood boxes were finally devised to contain some of the noise, but I still had my guys use hearing protectors while they stood reading real-time octal feeds from an early VELA satellite. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1403.html[^] As for nostalgia, who is old enough to remember gazing in wonder at the magnetic core memory of the old SAGE AN/FSQ7 built by IBM? http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Magnetic-Core_Memory[^]
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Speaking of CRT monitors, on the relaly cheap ones, I can hear the flyback transformer buzzing - sounds like a mosquitoe flying right next to my ear.
I need a 32 bit unsigned value just to hold the number of coding WTF I see in a day …
Blake Miller wrote:
Speaking of CRT monitors, on the relaly cheap ones,
The really expensive ones had the same problem. The noise-level has dropped nicely in the last few years, with very silent fans for the desktops, and nice and quiet lcd-screens and laserprinters. Hell, even the alarm has been replaced - the old siren is now a "silent alarm" :laugh:
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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PHS241 wrote:
Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak
First, a confession: I work for Eastman Kodak Company; my division makes commercial ink-jet printers. The business model in the printer industry is now based on the customer paying for usage rather than hardware. The printer mechanism is sold at or even below cost. Manufacturers make money by selling consumables. In the consumer market, the primary consumable is ink or toner. Competition is fierce, and cartridge prices are confined to a relatively narrow range. 40 pages of black and 20 pages of color is reasonable for a consumer ink-jet printer. I typically get less than that from my HP. Printers differ in how they use ink based on the type of printing you do and the type of paper. It's up to you to set those preferences each time you print in order to get the results you want. If you leave the driver set for photo paper, for example, you're going to use more ink than necessary. Setting 'draft' mode can help you economize on ink usage for day-to-day printing.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
The really big advantage those printers had was their fan fold paper. It allowed you to printer banners and even use the printer as a very inexpensive plotter that could plot images in banner wide strips and lengths to be combined into any size plot you needed.
NEVER take on a vast project with a half-vast idea.
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Speaking of CRT monitors, on the relaly cheap ones, I can hear the flyback transformer buzzing - sounds like a mosquitoe flying right next to my ear.
I need a 32 bit unsigned value just to hold the number of coding WTF I see in a day …
Yes I used to be able to hear the linescan whistle of old CRT monitors and TVs (it's about 16KHz on a PAL TV). Can't any more though. It's either old age or too many dot matrix printers in the past. Working as a sound engineer on big P.A. rigs didn't help either. There were about half a dozen big commercial dot matrix printers in the print room at a place where I once worked amongst all the other gear (and some of that was pretty noisy) It was in a soundproofed cellar and always smelt of ammonia (by-product of Diazo Printing) All the girls that worked in there wore ear defenders and communicated mostly by sign language like some Victorian textile mill. They were a friendly bunch though (Bit too friendly sometimes if you know what I mean). It was a place where rock hard grizzled welders feared to tread and very intimidating for a young apprentice (As I was at the time). But it had great air conditioning and was always at a nice constant temperature. It was the only place in the works that was air conditioned and they needed it.
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Shoe, back in the early 90's I wrote a function to print barcodes on a epson lx800 (before barcode fonts). Had to dig into the manual and learn all the "escape codes" for the epson standard - that function is still in use today to print slips for a file store. Will remember that rithmic grrrd,grrrd,grrrd till the day I croak!
So will I! I have noticed that a lot of tills and POS devices still use them for receipt printing They sure sound like it anyway and it's a very characteristic sound.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote:
still got a ringing in my ear
I have too, except mine's caused by tinnitus. I wonder if it too was a result of going to Dot Matrix concerts. ;)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
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The really big advantage those printers had was their fan fold paper. It allowed you to printer banners and even use the printer as a very inexpensive plotter that could plot images in banner wide strips and lengths to be combined into any size plot you needed.
NEVER take on a vast project with a half-vast idea.
We still use and sell dot matrix printers of many different varieties where I work. Nice thing about them for us is they usually have some internal font which doesn't require a driver, making talking to them from an embedded device as easy as sending them plain ascii text. There really is nothing like the annoyingly crunchy sound of them spitting out reams of tractor feed paper, driving your cubicle neighbors crazy with the disruption to their programming mojo by stealing the quiet from the room.
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
The problem nowadays is getting the fanfold paper. My accountant still uses a dot matrix for payroll on a Windows 98 PC. Think he's got enough paper to last him for the next 3 years. On the older systems, we had to program the page size. On the newer systems (since 3.1) it is all programmed in for you.
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
Damn, I had nearly forgotten and lost the memory of a pair of Datasouth Performax's thrashing their way through triplicate NCR, burning out their printheads requiring expensive repairs, ribbons becoming increasingly harder to get and more expensive, the Office Manager who decided to save money by buying aftermarket cartridges that would often jam up far far before the printing started to fade, usually at 1/3rd the life of the factory cartridges, and the fight when the owner after doing the math and figuring out the penalty was $100's of dollars, noisily objected.:mad: The clatter drove the two salespeople next to the printer room nuts, especially when it started printing content with bar codes. No, we don't miss them at all and gladly took a sledge to the last two we had in service as a cathartic therapy for the years of torture.
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Does anyone remember them? I know inkjet and laser printers largely killed them off but it irks me how much you pay for printer cartridges. I have a Kodak ESP printer. I bought a pack of black and colour cartridges about two months ago. I've probably printed about 40pp in black and maybe 20pp in colour, yet the printer tells me I have about 20% colour ink remaining. Clearly the printer is killing my cartridge so it can force me to buy another one: thanks a lot Kodak. What makes me even more annoying is that the printer driver's software will not honour my request to print using the black cartridge only; convenient, huh? I wish I could find a decent dot matrix printer and ribbons. What I liked about them was the almost therapeutic sound of the printhead slowly working its way to and fro. I also liked them because you could run a ribbon until it was almost bone dry and in danger of shredding and a cheap ribbon gave 100s of pages before you (the owner) felt it was the right time to replace the ribbon. I never objected to getting slightly inky fingers. I also remember those little tufts of printer fluff that gathered in corners. And if the paper wrecked when it slipped off the grip wheels you could manually advance it and carry on. By Jove; those were the days. Edit: I see that you can still buy them. It seems nostalgia is alive and well. :)
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
PHS241 wrote:
Does anyone remember them?
We provide software for GP practices in Ireland and the ONLY way to print a prescription which is covered by a medical card is onto multi-layer forms, thus Dot Matrix. The favourite is the Epson L(X or Q) 300 (xxx) because you can now get the paper in tractor feed. BUT there are many practices who use the single sheet feed paper that comes in either 3 layer or 6 layer paper (1 Month or 3 Month script), in that case they tend to use the Micro Line 320 Flatbed printer (Usually with a Centronics interface).