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MX-80 – Ahead of its time: A small, lightweight computer printer
- googamooga 8y agoIt was popular even in the USSR in mid-80s. MX-80 were brought in the Soviet Union as a part of Yamaha MSX-2 based computer classes for Soviet children. I remember my joy when I was able to print black and white New Year’s postcard with nice fonts and graphics on that printer in 1985 :-)
- agumonkey 8y agoYou just reminded me how happy we were to pick and see fonts on these in school ~computer days.
- ars 8y agoI still have mine somewhere in storage. I bet it would even still work if I got a USB->Parallel port adapter.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- timonoko 8y agoI wasted the 1980's trying to invent ribbon re-inking method.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI don't know about re-inking, but can't you loosen up a dried ribbon by using a light machine oil?
- timonoko 8y agoI think not. The paper sucks the oil and it spreads. Ribbon ink has very special dry but sticky qualities.
- Aloha 8y agoEpson still makes dot matrix printers too. https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact/c/w160 https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact/c/w160
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoOr for heavier duty work: http://printronix.com/product/line-matrix-en/p8000-open-pedestal/ http://printronix.com/product/line-matrix-en/p8000-open-pede... My first job was working on those printers, they haven't changed much 36 years later.
- fyfy18 8y agoWhat are they used for today? I assume they have better reliability (from their simpler technology) compared to inkjet or laser printers, which keeps them popular in certain industries.
- new299 8y agoLast time I saw them they were being used to print pay slips. Pre-printed slips on continuous feed paper fed into the printers on tracks. The printer then prints the name/amount. Same thing happens with checks. You can get them on continuous feed paper for dot matrix printers. Lots of legacy applications for official documents I imagine.
- donkeyd 8y agoI had the same question, so i looked it up. From Wikipedia: > They are good, reliable workhorses ideal for use in situations where low printing cost is more important than quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#Flatbed_dot_matrix_printer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_matrix_printing#Flatbed_do...
- detaro 8y agoThey also work with carbon paper, so they're popular for use cases where they want a stack of guaranteed-identical copies in one go (e.g. doctors offices still seem to have them quite often. print prescription, doctor signs it, copy for the records can be pulled off)
- cududa 8y agoFunny - I was just yesterday advertised one of these via the Amazon widget on Facebook
- ssdd 8y agoI would call it weird! OP surely received similar advertise that led to this post. Why would someone advertise such an old tech now?
- therealmarv 8y agoI still remember them and printing (very loud) TrueType fonts documents with TextMaker from DOS.
- Starwatcher2001 8y agoStill have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me. The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.
- donkeyd 8y ago> so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing, because as somebody who grow up with windows 3.1 being the earliest OS, these stories are great.
- int_19h 8y agoThis sort of thing is actually exactly what backspace was originally for - it predates computers, and was used on typewriters to e.g. make accented characters, or underline text (ASCII has underscore as a symbol for that exact purpose). You could also make things bold by doing backspace and then re-printing the same character, one or more times.
- vram22 8y agoRight, and that usage was later carried on to Unix man pages. Hence this tiny but handy script I wrote (and have used for years), to strip those formatting characters: m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-save-cleaned-up.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-...
- pasbesoin 8y agoI first had an Okidata. (Someone else's selection. I later picked up a used MX-80 -- or FX-80; I forget at the moment and don't feel like going to the basement cupboard to check.) It, too, could backspace. Mushing together characters got me umlauted vowels and Eszett.
- abdulhaq 8y agoThrowing away the manual to my Epson printers was a difficult thing to do but marked a milestone in a nerds life in that era
- zmix 8y agoYou mean, you threw away the manual, so you'd have to find out everything yourself, by playing/hacking with the system? Man, that'd be some real "Guy Hardening" you did there :-). Like, leaving your clothes at home and having a walk in the snow naked, sliding down the hill like a seal and rolling yourself back up.
- abdulhaq 8y agoIt's all part of my S.A.S. preparation.... currently doing survival training in a no internet situation
- Starwatcher2001 8y agoYou can find a copy here. Brings back memories. http://www.thecomputerarchive.com/thearchive/Manuals/Epson%20MX-80%20Printer%20Manual.pdf http://www.thecomputerarchive.com/thearchive/Manuals/Epson%2...
- lakkal 8y agoIt's neat that this manual from 1980 actually has an author prominently attributed and "Personal Note from the Author". I had an RX-80 that, that I loved, until it died in the same lightning storm that killed my Atari 800. I replaced it with a Panasonic, don't remember the model, but it was also a very good dot matrix printer.
- jgrahamc 8y agoI loved that printer. Did so much with it and was the first time I really did a bunch of stuff with ESC sequences. Bidirectional printing was cool and getting it to print graphics by driving the print head directly felt like magic. Anyone who programmed that printer will be instantly at home with Epson (and compatible) thermal printers and more.
- trop 8y agoIndeed! I remember using one to print zooms of the Mandelbrot set in grayscale (highly dithered) from an Apple ][+. For speed I coded in 6502 and called directly into the BASIC floating point routines for the math. The printer would take a day or so to print a sheet worth of image. But it was a great graphic output device, far less ephemeral than the screen. It was somewhat satisfying for it to print a new row of dots every now and then, once the computer had completed some math...
- somberi 8y agoLike to also draw attention to LX80, the dot matrix printer that followed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo and http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6040/Epson-LX-80/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6040/Epson-LX-80/
- Synaesthesia 8y agoOh yeah. Legendary printer. Lasted for absolute years and years.
- rwmj 8y agoAlso significant were the control codes. Many other printers offered Epson control code emulation, such as the Amstrad DMP* printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P
- trebligdivad 8y agoI think the ESC/P was the newer ones after the LQ series. I spent many an hour on our FX-80 (the successor to the MX-80), mostly doing label printing code for my dad's pharmacy. With all the escape codes documented it was great. The FX had the trick of being able to do reverse feed (From memory Esc [ 2j I think - heck that was some time ago?)
- dfox 8y agoLQ series used extended version called ESC/P2 (most of the extensions having to do with higher resolution of 24-pin printers).
- z2 8y agoIn working on an Android app for thermal receipt printers, I just recently learned how pervasive these control codes still are! It's great that Epson has kept up on very clear documentation, and even a surprisingly well made Android library.
- david-given 8y agoMy father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro. I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images sideways you could read a byte of horizontal scanline data from memory and throw it directly at the printer, which treated it as a vertical column of dots; this meant you didn't need the painfully expensive step of rotating each 8x8 character cell. Simple in hindsight, but it took ages to realise, and made screen dumps so much simpler and faster.
- gaius 8y agoI still have one here. Manually inserting control codes in Wordwise Plus! So much more satisfying than any modern word processor.
- Theodores 8y agoClassic combination - BBC Micro and MX-80. Seems you were hacking yours differently to what I was doing. I acquired some army headed letter (UK), or rather 'stole'. With it I forged a letter with my MX-80 to trick a friend's parent to pop into the army recruitment centre. This friend's parent had skived off National Service many aeons ago and I pranked him into going back to account for himself. The letter 'had to be legit' because it wasn't hand typed. So easily fooled. The things you do as a small child that you would never do as an adult.
- biggusdickus 8y agoYou'd go to bloody prison for 20 years now for things we did in 80ies/early 90ies
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI have the IBM rebrand on my desk. It still works absolutely flawlessly and you can get new ink ribbons fairly easily. http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/new-blinds.JPG http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/new-blinds.JPG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9vzMVK5kV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9vzMVK5kV8
- bhauer 8y agoThat is an amazing photo. I love how it looks as if you're about to get cracking on your personal finances in Lotus 1-2-3.
- agumonkey 8y agoLovely desk
- nsxwolf 8y agoLove the AT and the original BASIC and Operations guide!
- FreeFull 8y agoI love how clean and white all your hardware is. It all looks brand new.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoMost of it is painted, that's why its not yellowing. Unfortunately the paintwork is a little worse for wear in a few places. I did dig up the paint codes that IBM used, but what would be difficult to factor in is the slight discolouring over time.
- colejohnson66 8y agoWhy didn’t you try retrobrite?
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoUsed one of these back in the day. Excellent machines. Paper feed was so much more reliable and error-free compared to modern printers. And when things went wrong a reset and restart of the job was simple. Now I have to revere the psychology of the machine, and hope to god that its fragile plastic innards don't break. I'd willingly return to needing special printer paper if it meant I didn't have issues with the feeding mechanism.
- maxerickson 8y agoHave you tried a Brother laser?
- tom_ 8y agoAdd me to the list of people supporting this message. Mine is 13 years old and I've never had a problem with it. (The UI is very simple: one button. I don't know what it does, as I've never needed to press it. If a document fails to print, that just means the thing is out of paper.)
- codazoda 8y ago+1 for these. I've owned an HL-2270DW for almost 10 years and it continues to work flawlessly. Before that I had a similar USB only version. I just purchased it's color capable cousin as a Christmas gift.
- creeble 8y ago+2 I have two and have had fewer than 5 paper jams (all due to folded / reused paper) in something like 15 years.
- epynonymous 8y agoi owned one of these back in the 90's, i remember connecting this to my compaq 286 with a lpt1 port or whatever you call it. no color, but i remember printing nude gifs i had back thrn of playboy playmates. fyi, in china, when you eat at restaurants or buy things from stores you get these government tax receipts which are typically printed with these epsons, that's almost 30 years since i first started using these.
- aquamo 8y agoI saved up money to buy one of these in college, was amazing, fast, sounded like a well tuned race car :-) Still have some CSCI homework and projects on paper printed on this from my Atari ST.
- bhauer 8y agoWe had a similar model with the name of FX-80. A photo I just found: [1] http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp-content/uploads/fx80-537594-5.jpg http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp-content/uplo... Not sure how it compared to the MX-80, but it was definitely a great printer for its time. I remember finally replacing it was a 24-pin (oh the luxury) dot matrix printer after years of service by the FX-80.
- bitwize 8y agoThere was a program called Fancy Font that let you do a primitive form of DTP on one of these. You typed up your document in the Fancy Font markup language and then sent it off to the printer using the Fancy Font runoff program (called 'pfont'), which would print out the document, using graphics mode to render the, er, fancy fonts. Documents printed out this way on a dot matrix printer looked like ass, so when they became available Fancy Font supported the new exciting HP LaserJets.
- kmeade 8y agoMX-100 and green bar, for the win! (smile)
- ilaksh 8y agoIs there an emulator that handles this printer? I am working on a 3D multicore libretro frontend with Lua scripting. It would be interesting for me to have virtual printouts (images) to go along with a 3d model for something like this.
- apiudit 8y agoI recall designing fonts for the mx80 in basic, the user manual was my first programming "book".
- tabtab 8y agoI remember those, and often prefer them over ink-jet because one could often fix any problems themselves. With ink-jets, if there's problems, it's hard to see what's actually going on. You usually have to rely on software drivers to diagnose and/or clean them, which often fail for some reason (probably version compatibility). I'm really disappointed with ink-jets. The higher-quality dot-matrix ribbons rarely broke, just got tangled. You could untangle it and get back to work. The problems and solutions were more clear-cut, hands-on, and visual. If they could make dot-matrix printers match the resolution of ink-jets, I just may get one, at least as a back-up.