OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
61–70 of 259 posts
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#62OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.
The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB adapter even though he has it called a serial one.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#63So, 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…
Its not like a laser printer can really print line by line though.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#64OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.
The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB adapter even though he has it called a serial one.
Ah, that explains it. Thanks for pointing this out.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#65OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.
I was wondering how he plugged it in and magically there was /dev/lp0. but it makes more sense if its a parallel than a serial adapter.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#66I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on them... ...my SO would kill me.
Yes - the sound on the video reminded me of waiting for my homework to print out in the 80s.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#67This is great! I am currently thinking about getting a weekend paper newspaper like FT weekend. Reason being: I read news on my phone too often. And the news create negative emotion without being useful. News on paper and only once per week would make me more relaxed. His paper printer news daily would be great to bridge the gap in between! On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any hackable open sou…
I cannot recommend FT.
I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side.
That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#68For a while I’ve been printing “three-sided cards” which have an image on one side and a QR code with documentation on the other side
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029
the “third” side is the web site linked by the QR code.
I got bored with photography and made up a character who goes around with a cheap lens and always keeps the aperture around f/18 or more, uses heavy processing, color grades and shoots a standard non-standard aspect ratio so it looks like he’s using some weird camera from an alternate timeline.
I just started printing this series and came to the conclusion that 4x5 can be easily made by cutting down a 4x6 but instead of cutting it I’d have an inch to put in a QR code and documentation on the front: similarly I could cut down a 5x7 to a square 5x5 and fit documentation in there. I have a few boxes of glossy paper that aren’t printable on the back and I think I’m going to use the, that way. (Found out later that instagram has a 4x5 standard and that my sports photos taken with a good lens really look good in that format)
One question though is what the documentation looks like and I am split between: (1) minimal changes to what I have, (2) some kind of fake dot matrix or other effect that looks like an old printer that might have been built into that fantasy camera or (3) something that makes he most of what the inkjet printer can do.
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#69Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions… On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)
I miss the soundscape of old computers: - the POST beep - the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting - the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer - even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.
If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop.
I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/
Re: Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer
#70So, 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…
You can even do this with network printers, netcat a pdf to the open port and it will print.
https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-with-ne...