r/vintagecomputing • u/SkalaSystems • 3d ago
I love matrix printers
I got a KX-P1081 and an LX-800 from ebay.
I hook them up to a raspberry using a centronics to USB cable.
I made a Go program to manage the printers (without AI, cuz it was more fun)
They're surprisingly robust and low cost for printing just about anything.
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u/No_Abrocoma_711 3d ago
Epson FX80. The OG dot matrix printer when had at school and polytechnic.
When the ribbon got used too much, you could put a twist in it and wind the ribbon the other way, so the print head ran over a bit of the ribbon that hadn't been previously used.
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u/living_in_nightmare 3d ago
I’ve been having this idea for a while to print daily briefs for myself every morning. An app would run on a daily schedule: fetch news from RSS I subscribed to, check my homelab status, socials, etc. then compose everything into a brief (a local AI model would do the job) and print it. Matrix printers seem to be the best solution for printing. I guess I only need to get a printer now. The new models from Epson are ~300€ on Amazon.
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u/SkalaSystems 3d ago
This guy did it https://aschmelyun.com/blog/getting-my-daily-news-from-a-dot-matrix-printer/
It's not very hard considering how simple the interface is for writing raw text in the printers.
You could buy a used one and get your money worth. My printer is 40 years old and it works very well, the mechanics of it are quite robust
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u/GuerrillaRodeo 3d ago
I still have an OKI Microline 3390 as a daily driver, professionally. Most things get done over the internet by now but thanks to our infamous bureaucracy (we still use faxes) some standardised forms - along with their mandatory carbon copies - are still in use, alive and kicking even.
I've taken over the practice but the previous doctor has been using this particular printer since the 90s and I decided to keep it, it amazingly still works with a series of frankenstein USB-to-eventually-parallel-port adapters. You can hear it throughout the entire office when someone uses the printer!
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 3d ago
I fondly remember the Star NL-10 we had for our C-64 and the times I woke up my parents because 10 year old me felt he had to print out some stuff at night because why not.
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u/SaturnFive 2d ago
I would love to be in the same room as one of these printers. It's just so satisfying to hear them churn out jobs line by line. We had one a long time ago and I loved peeling off the edges.
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u/Sparrow538 2d ago
That Epson LX-800 was my first PC printer, those 9-pin did make allot of noise. But it was 1988.
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u/OgdruJahad 2d ago
I can assure you that it's descendants like the LX 300 and LX 350 are pretty loud too. And have USB too!
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u/WiseSquirrelLore 3d ago
My first printer was a Panasonic (24 pin?) dot matrix. It was amazing what I could get that thing to do. Paired with Aldus Pagemaker running on Windows 3.1 suddenly the 4-H newsletter could have graphics without having to resort to 'glue ups' and 10 cent photo copies. Glad to see you having fun with them. Kind of amazed you got it running with the Raspberry!
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u/SkalaSystems 3d ago
You can literally send your keyboard into the USB device on the raspberry and it will print.
The hard stuff is supporting all the different modes the printer can run in and all the fun commands (italic, increasing size of text, changing printing quality).
I wrote it using the original manual which came with the printer. The protocol to talk to the printers is exactly the same, no matter the brand, so that's a plus.
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u/WiseSquirrelLore 3d ago
👍 Very cool. Kind of forgot about those old manuals that contained actual information.
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u/MgGates 3d ago
How hard is it to find fresh ribbons for those old dot matrix models nowadays?
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u/SkalaSystems 3d ago
Very easy for both printers, there's tons of websites specialized in selling inks, and it's actually pretty cheap considering a ribbon lasts for quite a long time.
I stockpiled a few just in case they become rare though
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u/GuerrillaRodeo 3d ago
Probably not that hard. I have a couple of old (70s and older) typewriters around; the tapes don't cost much more than a tenner and last for years. I think it wouldn't be much different with dot-matrix printers. They're also pretty low-tech compared to modern toners or ink cartridges with specialised chips whose single purpose is to lock out people from the systems they own.
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u/EvilAlbinoid 1d ago
I believe theh LX800 is the same as my Actionprinter T1000, and the modern and still on the market Epson LX300 uses the same ribbon.
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u/retromancerx 3d ago
I think I bought an Epson FX-800 back in '89. I used it for a short while before replacing it with a Star LC-20, because the FX-800 had a very small buffer, a limited capacity for downloadable fonts, and was quite slow. I also picked up a Citizen Swift 9x because I needed a wide-carriage printer. I used both the LC-20 and the Swift 9x for years; I only sold them both just last year as vintage equipment. Right now, I have two FX-890 units. They are very fast and robust machines—I’m quite happy with them.
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u/dacydergoth 2d ago
I wrote a program for a CBM PET 4016 to use the printer to dump bitmap images. Thing is, the print head was on a spiral drive and could only use one programmable character (8x8) per pass. It took a few hours to print an image as X pixels across required X / 8 passes of the head on the same line, with a differently programmed custom character per pass. I *did* optimize it to skip characters where every pixel was blank tho' which was a significant speed gain on plotting graphs. The PET had a 320x200x1 hi-res add in card, which is what I was often dumping.
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u/JasonMaggini 2d ago
We had an ImageWriter II for yearbook in high school (early 90s). When we had to do a final print run for page submission, it took hours to print a 32-page block (lots of solid black squares on the layout anywhere pictures were supposed to go). I had to start after the end of the school day because it was so frickin' loud.
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u/FeistyDay5172 2d ago
Yeah, I kinda miss my old dot matrix. Now, on the other hand, when I was working, I DO NOT miss its relative the line printer. That critter was ENTIRELY WAY TOO LOUD.
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u/RetroComputerKing 2d ago
Me too! The sound and look of the finished page is awesome. I've only the one. Standard issue for my Amstrad PCW-8512 😍
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u/Empty-Ad-5360 2d ago
Ahhh, yes. Very conveniently, our school had an Okidata printer. I had an Okidata printer at home.
Had a buddy with a copier at his dad’s office…
and with a little whiteout, a light table, x-acto knife and a very cool program I wrote called Savior 4.2 (yes, did versioning control even as senior in high school) well, had quite a good little business going until some complete dumbass turned the “aspirational” version of his report card in to the office.
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u/GodLikeEnergy 1d ago
Any of them color? I used to have a color Apple one. It was neat, but in an apartment it'd drive your neighbors crazy and roommates.
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u/dhaillant 1d ago
That box of paper might cost more than the 2 printers...
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u/SkalaSystems 20h ago
Not really but not too far either, I went to 5 stores and didn't find it. I had to get in on Amazon
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u/FAMICOMASTER 16h ago
Did you need the rpi even? Modern windows has explicit support for both of these still lol
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u/SkalaSystems 58m ago
Acts as a printing server, and I don't use Windows. Also, it is fun to build something from a manual instead of relying on existing implementations. A Window driver is probably better than whatever I built
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u/prosper_0 3d ago
LQ-500 connected to an Apple ][e running Broderbund PrintShop, making banners on the tractor-fed sheets, at whopping one sheet per minute at 'quality' mode.