Daisy Wheel Printers

[+FarmerPotato]

Did anyone here use a daisy wheel printer? What kind, a d  what was your experience with it?
 

I found two type wheels at Goodwill (in a box with other vintage goodies.) 

 

My only experience was the TI home computer branded, Epson MX-80 dot matrix, and TI  Omni 800 (similar.) But I remember a lot of ads for daisy wheel printers like Star Micronics and Smith-Corona. 

Say I want to reprint several copies of my 80s manuals, which were originally made in TI Writer and Epson MX-80.

 
I’ve acquired the Epson and some new old stock ribbons (wish me luck.)

 

But I’m curious if I should try to get a working daisy wheel printer. 

 

[+arcadeshopper]

Did anyone here use a daisy wheel printer? What kind, a d  what was your experience with it?

 

I found two type wheels at Goodwill (in a box with other vintage goodies.) 

 

My only experience was the TI home computer branded, Epson MX-80 dot matrix, and TI  Omni 800 (similar.) But I remember a lot of ads for daisy wheel printers like Star Micronics and Smith-Corona. 

 

Say I want to reprint several copies of my 80s manuals, which were originally made in TI Writer and Epson MX-80.

 

I’ve acquired the Epson and some new old stock ribbons (wish me luck.)

 

But I’m curious if I should try to get a working daisy wheel printer. 

 

I have over the years you will find them to be great output quality but loud and proprietary code wise

 

Laser beats them hands down

 

I worked at an escrow company in the mid 80s that used the typewriter kind that was also a printer to print the escrow documents through the multipart forms...

 

Also maintained my mother's digital electronics printer that she used for court reporting throughout my high school years

 

They have their place but I think that's in the past especially since you can print to your tipi and then I'll put the PDF to your PC and print it on whatever you got

 

 

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

 

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

6 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

loud and proprietary code wise

I didn't think of that. I guess I would be exiled to the garage to print, then. I would need to find out how TI-99/4A programs printed to them?

 

I know laser printers win every time. I would not go back!

 

For Bubble Plane, I'm interested in faithful reproduction. Upgrading from dot-matrix to daisy wheel is fair. I searched here, and found mentions that Databiotics manuals were from daisy-wheel.

 

 

[+arcadeshopper]

Well you just send ASCII and it prints it.. it's things like bold and subscript etc that take codes whatever printer you end up with will have it's own set that you get to embed

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+OLD CS1]

My elementary school office had an IBM (I think?) daisy wheel typewriter which had a serial interface connected to an Apple II.  They used it to print whatever they needed then ditto (remember those?!) the prints.  Apparently ditto copy did not handle the office dot-matrix output very well.

 

My experience is just knowing that it worked and the output was really good and crisp.

 

So far as I know, they did not use anything special to print (some ProDOS-based word processor.)  It seems like it just printed plain ASCII text.

[+FarmerPotato]

12 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said:

Well you just send ASCII and it prints it.. it's things like bold and subscript etc that take codes whatever printer you end up with will have it's own set that you get to embed
 

Yeah I messed around with a lot of Epson code sequences, embedding them in TI-Writer. Ate up the manual that came with TI's Epson printer. Made my label program in XB to put graphics on labels, exported from TI-Artist as instances. 

 

All I really need is bold, and that's just a CR (no LF, a second copy of the bolded words, then CRLF.

 

Another thing is I see on daisy wheel printers is friction feed. So I don't have to stock up on tractor feed paper.

 

Actually, the worst thing is making the booklets. In 1986, I printed each 1/2 page separately, because you couldn't very well make it come out rotated 90 degrees. Then I cut them out, pasted them to pages of a booklet, and photocopied. I can see a lot of ugly marks around the edges.

 

Maybe I will just laser-print it and let it be. 

 

For the TI Omni 835, tractor feed dot matrix, I see that Staples still sells wide paper with the green-and-white stripes.

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

4 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

My elementary school office had an IBM (I think?) daisy wheel typewriter which had a serial interface connected to an Apple II.  They used it to print whatever they needed then ditto (remember those?!) the prints.  Apparently ditto copy did not handle the office dot-matrix output very well.

 

My experience is just knowing that it worked and the output was really good and crisp.

 

So far as I know, they did not use anything special to print (some ProDOS-based word processor.)  It seems like it just printed plain ASCII text.

I wonder how many of the Brother daisy wheel typewriters on eBay have serial ports?

 

I was a ditto-boy in 1990. The first step is to make a transparency from the original. Fine details are not its forte, so I can see dot matrix being a problem. You run the paper and the transparency through the purpling machine, and get purple dittos out. College students still got dittos for some classes because photocopies cost much more.

 

 

 

 

[+chue]

Not sure if emulation is your thing, but you can always go laser + a daisy wheel font:

 

 

Daisy wheel font above (by Volker Busse) is attached.  I always imagined it to look more like courier, but there was probably more than one look.

Daisy Wheel.zip

[apersson850]

I had a friend who used one. He ran a business, and used the TI-99/4A to generate various documents for that business. So he bought a daisy wheel printer, since lasers didn't really exist in today's sense at that time.

[wierd_w]

I remember, back in my youth, I had a dire need for a printer (any printer).

 

We had a smith-corona daisy wheel type writer, and I looked that thing over head to foot looking for any kind of interface port on it.

 

No dice.

 

It was about 3 years later, we got that 486, which came with a nice color dot matrix printer. You have no idea how happy I was to get it.  I had been laboring with manually typed documents on that same Smith-corona typewriter for "MUST BE TYPED!" schoolwork for quite some time by then.

[+FarmerPotato]

5 hours ago, wierd_w said:

I remember, back in my youth, I had a dire need for a printer (any printer).

 

We had a smith-corona daisy wheel type writer, and I looked that thing over head to foot looking for any kind of interface port on it.

 

No dice.

 

It was about 3 years later, we got that 486, which came with a nice color dot matrix printer. You have no idea how happy I was to get it.  I had been laboring with manually typed documents on that same Smith-corona typewriter for "MUST BE TYPED!" schoolwork for quite some time by then.

Thanks for the anecdote.

 

Color dot matrix... I've heard of those but never seen one.

 

I remember a memory typewriter (you know, 2K of RAM for a page.) I told its owner that I would see if somehow it could work as a printer. Even opened it up and broke it. 

 

Had to give them an old dot matrix printer to make up for that, and then their TI-99/4A was vastly more useful!

 

 

[+FarmerPotato]

Here are the two wheels I found. (Not sure if they were in the Goodwill box with the floppies, or from another collection.)

 

 

 

 

[apersson850]

3 hours ago, FarmerPotato said:

Color dot matrix... I've heard of those but never seen one.

I still have one. But I've never had any of the rainbow colored ink ribbons required to use the color function.

Edited August 3, 2021 by apersson850

[+arcadeshopper]

I still have my star color dmp
Needs a new ribbon

If you print to the tipi printer PI.PIO that emulates the color Epson compatible printer and works great

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[Casey]

When I was in high school, our writing classroom had 2 daisy wheel printers.  1 was a Diablo 630, it was shared by 8 PCs.  The other was not branded as Diablo but looked exactly like it (can't remember its brand) - it was shared by 8 Xerox CP/M machines.  These used carbon based ribbons.  They produced fantastic looking output, but they were quite loud.  My recollection is that the Diablo 630 was faster than the other one, but not by much. 

[HOME AUTOMATION]

Oops...

 

 

I would have tried the correct-type, if I wasn't so blind.

 

brother SX-4000.

[wierd_w]

11 hours ago, FarmerPotato said:

Thanks for the anecdote.

 

Color dot matrix... I've heard of those but never seen one.

 

I remember a memory typewriter (you know, 2K of RAM for a page.) I told its owner that I would see if somehow it could work as a printer. Even opened it up and broke it. 

 

Had to give them an old dot matrix printer to make up for that, and then their TI-99/4A was vastly more useful!

 

 

How can you have never seen one?
Apple image writer II springs directly to mind, as a well known vintage one.

 

I believe mine was an Epson LQ-300-II though. Looked a lot like this one, including the 4 color ribbon.

 

 

 

I remember that the ribbon cassette had a nasty habit of getting the ribbon a bit out of alignment, so that the strike would hit at the edge of two colors, and not dead in the center of the color swatch. There was a manual adjustment to correct for it, but it was not the best solution, IMO.

 

Still, it was a color printer, in the very early 90s.

 

 

 

 

[+Ksarul]

The Diablo 630 was pretty much the standard go-to printer for daisy wheel users. I used to see them everywhere. They were often rebadged and sold as other brands too, similar to the Epsons that TI used.

[+FarmerPotato]

On 8/2/2021 at 10:49 PM, chue said:

Not sure if emulation is your thing, but you can always go laser + a daisy wheel font:

 

 

I tried it out!

 

This font has fewer serifs than the TI dot matrix, but it looks good.

 

Here are two versions of the same document. Guess which one is the original.

 

HexBus1.pdf

HexBus2.pdf

 

Screen snaps:

 

Original

 

 

 

Daisy Wheel

 

 

Mono Elite Regular

 

I tried these Epson FX-80 style fonts, EliteRegular (12 cpi) and PicaRegular (10 cpi)

http://const-iterator.de/fxmatrix/

With Elite:

 

 

 

Mono Pica Regular

Pica is more appealing to me, but 80 characters wouldn't fit in the same margins.