5 ms·

Epson MX-80 Fonts

194 points by m_walden 1y ago

fuzzfactor 1y ago
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 between the PC and the printer, other than the trigger that makes it print the right letter on the paper. 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. After a while fonts appeared which you loaded in the PC, which would then send every one of their dots to the printer in graphics mode, so there was a lot fancier text output available. But it was fiddly and didn't always work right, and by that time there were newer printers having lots of those typewriter-style fonts built in. Those who couldn't get the fonts installed into their PC correctly, for the old MX and FX printers to print all fancy like the few real geeks were doing, just got a new printer instead and their office correspondence went from these bare-bones Epson fonts to pseudo-letter-quality just plugging in the new printer. Windows 3.1 made it a little easier to get the auxiliary DOS fonts going, but people mostly had gotten newer printers by then. By the time Windows 95 came out very few of these old printers were still being used, but there were plenty of True-Type fonts built into Windows by then, plus the built-in drivers for such old printers were very mature. So it was never really very common knowledge, 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.
- m_walden 1y ago
  Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!
  - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
    I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.
    - tengwar2 1y ago
      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/page/n120/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
      - weinzierl 1y ago
        They sold boxes specifically for that.
        LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
        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.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      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 ;)
- ylee 1y ago
  >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/GEOS on Tandy 1000! (Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
  - jjwiseman 1y ago
    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.
- kragen 1y ago
  I don't think the original Epson ROM on the MX-80 had a graphics mode. I think that was a feature added by the Graftrax-80 ROM: https://archive.org/details/Graftrax-80_1981_Epson_America/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Graftrax-80_1981_Epson_America/m...
  - ccwu9999 1y ago
    You are right. I bought (well my parents did) and it came with a complimentary upgrade. We installed the chip and it was great but the driver was not universal so it printed out with a slow stretch so the lines would go downward on the right side. We took it back for tech support and it turned out it was a software issue. My first lesson in debugging goes up the stack. (I was like 13 I think)
- aidenn0 1y ago
  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.
  - weinzierl 1y ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      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.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  I had an FX-80 and although you could print your True Type fonts on it (from Windows 3.1 onwards) it would chew through the ribbon and the print head would get very hot.
- zvr 1y ago
  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!
- jacquesm 1y ago
  > 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.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  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.
- int_19h 1y ago
  8-dot matrix printers were still in heavy use at the time Win95 came out, and for some time afterwards. For good reasons: they were cheap, and you really don't need anything more than that to print out invoices and the like, which is what most businesses need a printer for.
0_-_0 1y ago
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 https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson2.png (taken from https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix). Still, thanks for sharing this! EDIT: Now I know what the issue is! Per the link above: "Like other impact printers, the Epson series of dot matrix printers used a 6x9 grid to arrange the dots for each letter. Dots could also be printed halfway between each vertical line on the grid, effectively providing a higher resolution of 12x9 for each printed character." Here's an illustration: https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson1.png https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson1.png
- Tor3 1y ago
  I usually printed my listings etc. with "condensed" fonts. They looked very nice. Even so, I can't remember that the non-condensed fonts should look that wide, when looking at the web page.. I remember something kind of like that, but not the standard mode. I have an OKI Epson-compatible matrix printer somewhere in the man cave. The last time I printed anything on one was a Snoopy calendar generated by the Snoopy Calendar Fortran program. If I ever get the mess in the cave sorted out I'll get that printer hooked up again, to something. The 80's mini maybe..
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Thanks, I was immediately wondering what was wrong with that web page as I never had such wide fonts coming out on paper.
  - unnah 1y ago
    Never? There definitely was a double-width feature on those printers, as demonstrated in the manual: https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers/Epson%20MX-80%20Printer%20Manual.pdf https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers...
- 1y ago
whyenot 1y ago
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 other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS. A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work. Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.
- dcminter 1y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.
    - ghaff 1y 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.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Dad's automotive shop had an Okidata Microline 192 Plus 9-pin printer to print work orders on carbonless copy paper. Damn, that thing was loud. And tearing perforated sheets from the edges without tearing the pages. Always fun, especially on cheap paper. And, it had that chemical smell.
bux93 1y ago
>For best results, it is recommended to use these fonts with the following color scheme (as used here on this web page): > Foreground: black (#000000) (Ink) > Background: white (#FFFFFF) (Paper) What about the alternating green bars? And the perforation?
- billygoat 1y ago
  And even the newest ink ribbons were not that black. And the dots were never so crispy and individually formed on real paper. And as discussed above, everything is far too wide. The dots blended together and created diagonals at least a little bit; thats not reflected here.
- lewiscollard 1y ago
  > What about the alternating green bars? body { background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, white 0%, white 1em, #7cb8a6 1em, #7cb8a6 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 2px)); background-size: 100% calc(2em + 2px); } adjust colours to taste :) extra credit if you implement dark mode!
blablabla123 1y ago
I used to have an old dot matrix printer with my PC in the 90s from my dad. Of course it was also possible to put in "normal" paper as the top unit was removable and print with ttf fonts. My mom liked the printing of the dot matrix printer much more though than the inkjet I later had. (Not sure though if it was an MX-80 or a later model/edition)
nickdothutton 1y ago
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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  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.
karanveer 1y ago
[flagged]
karanveer 1y ago
This is a time travel to the 1980s.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jpl56 1y ago
(looking at the "RX-80" box sitting next to my desk that contains student memories) This is a cool website, thanks for making this!
rsynnott 1y ago
Ah, yes, the EPSON MX-80. Majestically noisy.
- imglorp 1y ago
  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.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  But not as noisy as a daisy wheel. Those things sounded like machine gun fire.
quercusa 1y ago
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.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  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.
- TMWNN 1y ago
  > 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 https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19>
bitwize 1y ago
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.
kazinator 1y ago
Back in elementary school, I wrote a font editor for the FX- cousins of these printers. Good times!
badc0ffee 1y ago
This 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.
abullinan 1y ago
I 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.
apricot 1y ago
Maybe 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.

194 points by m_walden 1y ago

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 between the PC and the printer, other than the trigger that makes it print the right letter on the paper. 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. After a while fonts appeared which you loaded in the PC, which would then send every one of their dots to the printer in graphics mode, so there was a lot fancier text output available. But it was fiddly and didn't always work right, and by that time there were newer printers having lots of those typewriter-style fonts built in. Those who couldn't get the fonts installed into their PC correctly, for the old MX and FX printers to print all fancy like the few real geeks were doing, just got a new printer instead and their office correspondence went from these bare-bones Epson fonts to pseudo-letter-quality just plugging in the new printer. Windows 3.1 made it a little easier to get the auxiliary DOS fonts going, but people mostly had gotten newer printers by then. By the time Windows 95 came out very few of these old printers were still being used, but there were plenty of True-Type fonts built into Windows by then, plus the built-in drivers for such old printers were very mature. So it was never really very common knowledge, 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.

m_walden 1y ago
Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.
  - tengwar2 1y ago
    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/page/n120/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1982-10/pag...) controlling some lab equipment. Setting that up was my first paid job.
    - weinzierl 1y ago
      They sold boxes specifically for that.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
        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.
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    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 ;)
ylee 1y ago
>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/GEOS on Tandy 1000! (Although I mostly used SpeedScript on C64, and WordPerfect or pfs:Write on DOS.)
- jjwiseman 1y ago
  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.
kragen 1y ago
I don't think the original Epson ROM on the MX-80 had a graphics mode. I think that was a feature added by the Graftrax-80 ROM: https://archive.org/details/Graftrax-80_1981_Epson_America/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Graftrax-80_1981_Epson_America/m...
- ccwu9999 1y ago
  You are right. I bought (well my parents did) and it came with a complimentary upgrade. We installed the chip and it was great but the driver was not universal so it printed out with a slow stretch so the lines would go downward on the right side. We took it back for tech support and it turned out it was a software issue. My first lesson in debugging goes up the stack. (I was like 13 I think)
aidenn0 1y ago
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.
- weinzierl 1y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    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.
tonyedgecombe 1y ago
I had an FX-80 and although you could print your True Type fonts on it (from Windows 3.1 onwards) it would chew through the ribbon and the print head would get very hot.
zvr 1y ago
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!
jacquesm 1y ago
> 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.
badc0ffee 1y ago
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.
int_19h 1y ago
8-dot matrix printers were still in heavy use at the time Win95 came out, and for some time afterwards. For good reasons: they were cheap, and you really don't need anything more than that to print out invoices and the like, which is what most businesses need a printer for.

0_-_0 1y ago

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 https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson2.png (taken from https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix https://technicallywewrite.com/2024/07/01/dotmatrix). Still, thanks for sharing this! EDIT: Now I know what the issue is! Per the link above: "Like other impact printers, the Epson series of dot matrix printers used a 6x9 grid to arrange the dots for each letter. Dots could also be printed halfway between each vertical line on the grid, effectively providing a higher resolution of 12x9 for each printed character." Here's an illustration: https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson1.png https://technicallywewrite.com/images/2024/07/epson1.png

Tor3 1y ago
I usually printed my listings etc. with "condensed" fonts. They looked very nice. Even so, I can't remember that the non-condensed fonts should look that wide, when looking at the web page.. I remember something kind of like that, but not the standard mode. I have an OKI Epson-compatible matrix printer somewhere in the man cave. The last time I printed anything on one was a Snoopy calendar generated by the Snoopy Calendar Fortran program. If I ever get the mess in the cave sorted out I'll get that printer hooked up again, to something. The 80's mini maybe..
prmoustache 1y ago
Thanks, I was immediately wondering what was wrong with that web page as I never had such wide fonts coming out on paper.
- unnah 1y ago
  Never? There definitely was a double-width feature on those printers, as demonstrated in the manual: https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers/Epson%20MX-80%20Printer%20Manual.pdf https://www.apple.asimov.net/documentation/hardware/printers...
1y ago

whyenot 1y ago

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 other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS. A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work. Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.

dcminter 1y ago
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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I wished someone had given me that particular piece of advice a couple of decades ago.
  - ghaff 1y 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.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Dad's automotive shop had an Okidata Microline 192 Plus 9-pin printer to print work orders on carbonless copy paper. Damn, that thing was loud. And tearing perforated sheets from the edges without tearing the pages. Always fun, especially on cheap paper. And, it had that chemical smell.

bux93 1y ago

>For best results, it is recommended to use these fonts with the following color scheme (as used here on this web page): > Foreground: black (#000000) (Ink) > Background: white (#FFFFFF) (Paper) What about the alternating green bars? And the perforation?

billygoat 1y ago
And even the newest ink ribbons were not that black. And the dots were never so crispy and individually formed on real paper. And as discussed above, everything is far too wide. The dots blended together and created diagonals at least a little bit; thats not reflected here.
lewiscollard 1y ago
> What about the alternating green bars? body { background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, white 0%, white 1em, #7cb8a6 1em, #7cb8a6 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(1em + 1px), #dbfcf5 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 1px), #7cb8a6 calc(2em + 2px)); background-size: 100% calc(2em + 2px); } adjust colours to taste :) extra credit if you implement dark mode!

blablabla123 1y ago

I used to have an old dot matrix printer with my PC in the 90s from my dad. Of course it was also possible to put in "normal" paper as the top unit was removable and print with ttf fonts. My mom liked the printing of the dot matrix printer much more though than the inkjet I later had. (Not sure though if it was an MX-80 or a later model/edition)

nickdothutton 1y ago

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.

jacquesm 1y ago
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.

karanveer 1y ago

[flagged]

karanveer 1y ago

This is a time travel to the 1980s.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jpl56 1y ago

(looking at the "RX-80" box sitting next to my desk that contains student memories) This is a cool website, thanks for making this!

rsynnott 1y ago

Ah, yes, the EPSON MX-80. Majestically noisy.

imglorp 1y ago
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.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
But not as noisy as a daisy wheel. Those things sounded like machine gun fire.

quercusa 1y ago

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.

fuzzfactor 1y ago
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.
TMWNN 1y ago
> 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 https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19>

bitwize 1y ago

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.

kazinator 1y ago

Back in elementary school, I wrote a font editor for the FX- cousins of these printers. Good times!

badc0ffee 1y ago

This 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.

abullinan 1y ago

I 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.

apricot 1y ago

Maybe 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.