Comment by fuzzfactor
6 days 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.
>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.)
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.
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/m...
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)
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
Thanks for you memories and observations on old printers!
I don't miss the piercing sounds they made.
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.
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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 ;)