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Epson MX-80 Fonts

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Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#41

Post by weinzierl »

aidenn0 wrote: post #8
fuzzfactor wrote: post #2

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 b…

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#42

Post by weinzierl »

tengwar2 wrote: post #30
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#43

Post by imglorp »

rsynnott wrote: post #36

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#44

Post by jjwiseman »

ylee wrote: post #4
fuzzfactor wrote: post #2

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 b…

>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/G…

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#45

Post by wiredfool »

mark-r wrote: post #39
wiredfool wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#47

Post by bitwize »

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#48

Post by LocalH »

dphnx wrote: post #19
0_-_0 wrote: post #9

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 shar…

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%); }

I played with it a bit and 65% or so seemed more accurate to my memories

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#49

Post by zvr »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #2

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 b…

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!

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#50

Post by fuzzfactor »

quercusa wrote: post #46

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.

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.

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