Comment by quercusa
2 days 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.
2 days 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.
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.
> 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>