Back in elementary school, I wrote a font editor for the FX- cousins of these printers. Good times!
Epson MX-80 Fonts
61–70 of 72 posts
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#62From the page: The EPSON MX-80 printer was a commercially successful product in the early 1980s. That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
> That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.
"I doubt we'll ever bomb Japan as long as they make Epson printers" —Woz, 1983 https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19>
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#63This makes me nostalgic for my family's Roland DG printer (although the text looks too wide). But I remember at the time never being satisfied with the quality, wanting a colour 24-pin or a laser printer. Still, I made full use of that thing, with papers in WordPerfect and cards and banners in The Print Shop.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#64A 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…
People were printing cards and signs in graphics mode from printers like the FX-80 years before Windows 3.1, from software like The Print Shop. Or, from any word processor if they owned a Mac.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think they were mandatory for Doctors medical practices after some point in Germany.
There the Epsons were called the "Ärztedrucker" because Doctors they used them for "carbon copy" prescriptions. Even after Laser- or Inkjetprinters were common. No carbon copy possible there. And they had to be carbon copied, for legal reasons.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#66I had a line of freshman out my dorm room door in college because I was one of three kids with a PC in my dorm and the only one with a printer. My good ol epson mx80. I charged each procrastinator a beer for last minute print jobs because the computer center was a 20 minute walk from the dorms. I drank a lot that year. But the funny part is the vast majority of engineering and compsci students didn’t have a personal computer. Let that sink in.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#67Earlier 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.
Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#68Maybe there's something I don't understand, but I think "broken bar" should be a broken bar, and "vertical line" should be a vertical line, rather than the reverse.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.
Likewise. I used to possess a hand-written letter from Sophie Wilson (of Acorn/ARM fame) replying to my own hand-written query letter at around 1981 when I was 16 and learning to program my Acorn Atom.
Oh that really hurts. That would be an amazing memento.
Re: Epson MX-80 Fonts
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good point, the dots were produced by pins that were round. What I meant to say was that the spacing might have been different in the two directions.