When I was in school, I would use an Epson LX80 to print a stencil for a Mimeograph. I would remove the tape so that it would hit the stencil harder.
I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the memories...
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
51–60 of 259 posts
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#52Back in time: Dont have fancy big screen monitors
just
echo > /dev/lp0. Like Redirect output to physical stdout
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#53Matrix printers can actually do quite a lot... depending on the models, you can change fonts, use bold, underline, sometimes italic, double-width and double-height characters and even graphics (although often are relatively low resolutions like 90 or 180 DPI). One funny thing I did once for a escape-room-like game, was a box with only a parallel printer connector on it. When connected to the printer, it was parasite-…
My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.
You could probably make your own multicolor ribbon.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer) I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and emulate…
IIRC, Apple employed the maintainer[1] of CUPS - which is/was available on MacOS for network printing, and has been available on Linux for even longer. I would be surprised if the feature was not available on Linux for your printer. Edit: added footnote 1. The chief maintainer - not the only maintainer, between 2007-2019
> which is/was available on MacOS for network printing
Very much IS there in the background.
See http://localhost:631/printers on your OS X machine.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#55This is fantastic. I can't remember the last time I've interfaced with a dot matrix printer. It might have been in college getting a print out of Fortran programs. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#56Very environmental
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#57from '92 to '96 one of my jobs was producing a daily news summary from usenet and a feed of the Federal Register. delivered as 40 to 100 densely printed dot matrix pages. Couple boxes of paper a month. Re-inked ribbons so often they'd wear through. The Epson LQ printers were incredible machines. the one (an a half) I used for that job did that, plus millions of mailing labels, with hardly a burp. There were some part…
Still have my LQ 100 in my parents attic, perhaps I could do something like this. Sadly I don't have the paper feeder (I only used A4 paper with it).
I pulled a couple out of my pile a few years ago to look at. The rubbers were pretty well gone on mine, belts gone, the rails had some sort of blooming corrosion.
unless you've got very lucky it's probably a real refurbishment job to make one run today. Quick look suggest Epson 9pin and 24pin form feed impact printers are still being made.
https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590...
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#58And there you have it folks - print is back! The old monolithic newspaper execs were right after all.
That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend task.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#59So, curiosity today. One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0. Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed. Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the…
> Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.
It would be possible to write a PostScript program that emulates ESC/P (or PCL), although then you would have to send an entire page (or a page break) before the page would be printed, unlike the old dot-matrix line printers that you can print one line at a time, PostScript can only print one page at a time.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#60[deleted]