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Epson MX-80 Fonts

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Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#51

Post by raudette »

whyenot wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#52

Post by jacquesm »

dcminter wrote: post #17
whyenot wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#53

Post by jacquesm »

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…

> 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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#54

Post by jacquesm »

weinzierl wrote: post #41
aidenn0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#55

Post by jacquesm »

nickdothutton wrote: post #18

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#56

Post by fuzzfactor »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #6
m_walden wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!

I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.

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 ;)

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#58

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

whyenot wrote: post #12

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…

> 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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#59

Post by ghaff »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
dcminter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts

#60

Post by dole »

manosyja wrote: post #27
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…

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.

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.
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