5 ms·

Inkjets came after laser printers. Gary saved us from the rat-tat-tat-tat of the dot matrix printer. Very annoying sound.

by pravda 7y ago

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
But if there were no lasers I would have probably been paying my monthly tithe to HP forever.
- olliej 7y ago
  Now there’s just the toner cartels, which also cost vastly more to buy than to make, and aren’t refillable, and also have DRM. HP, Brother, etc haven’t run out of ways to screw us yet :(
  - Moru 7y ago
    I usually buy brother because they didn't do that to me so far. But the last ones I bought are still working fine so haven't seen any new developement they did. Are they going the HP way now? When the toner light goes on I just open up, shake it carefully from side to side and stuff it back in. It happily prints another 200 pages before it complains again. HL-1430 is my latest one, it just refuses to die. But all brothers we bought for work is also running way past their expected lifetime. The HP:s on the other hand breaks down all the time.
    - eitland 7y ago
      I still stay away from Brother after having to support a bunch of really annoying Brother laser printers/faxes 15 years ago. Is Brother ok quality these days?
sohkamyung 7y ago
Before laser printers, I believe line printers were the printers of choice for high throughput. But the noise they made would have been incredible.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  You can still buy them[1]. 37 years ago I started my career working on these, they haven't really changed much in between. http://printronix.com/products/line-matrix-en/ http://printronix.com/products/line-matrix-en/
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yes, many mainframe shops replaced their line printers with early lasers (which were super expensive, the price only came down after a couple of years).
  - kjs3 7y ago
    Yup. At Georgia Tech, they attached a massive Xerox 9700 series laser printer to one of the CDC Cyber 180s (it may have been more complicated connection). It was a few hundred square feet of floor space for the whole install, it could spit out vast amounts of paper, and was pretty finicky to keep running. But (most) everyone liked it better than the equally massive, vastly louder, band printers.
- macjohnmcc 7y ago
  I used to work for a company that had a band printer. The characters were on a metal band like that in a band saw with duplicates of the letters around the band. The printer would spin that band around and make an imprint. It was incredibly fast and incredibly noisy. The printer had to be in a noise dampening enclosure.
  - drfuchs 7y ago
    IBM mainframes in the 70's invariably came with the IBM 1403 high-speed band printer, which pretty much represented the apex of band-printing technology. They printed 132 column, 66 line pages of EBCDIC text at a few seconds per page (depending on how many lines were blank, which characters were being printed, and what band you had installed). They were about the size of a washer and dryer pair, and made a pretty big racket. The computer operators (!) loaded them with special "green band" paper stock that came in boxes about the size of a 12-ream box of printer paper you'd buy at OfficeDepot today, but it was all one big continuous z-fold piece, with sprocket holes down each side for the printer to grab and power it through the paper path. Jobs were printed with special "separator pages" to help to operators find where to split the perforated printouts and deliver them to the right users' collection bins.
rwem 7y ago
I think of the laser as saving us from losing an arm in IBM's variously terrifying chain printers.
themodelplumber 7y ago
Did they rat-tat? I must have just missed those. I remember a lot of high-pitched _reeeee_ sounds, though certainly accompanied by a fascinating crunchy texture. :-)
- Darkphibre 7y ago
  rat-tat was impact printers (Daisy Wheel, or Character printer), rather than dot-matrix. :) Good grief, that brings back memories. I had one of these as my first printer as a kid, hooked up to an Apple ][e. It shook the table so hard things would fall off. :D https://youtu.be/6gjln8KygG0?t=70 https://youtu.be/6gjln8KygG0?t=70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYRJybnpGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYRJybnpGs
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    They would also disturb the acoustically coupled modems - I recall having to sit an acoustic coupler on a thick piece of foam.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > It shook the table so hard things would fall off. One of my earliest "computer memories" as a kid was being in a Radio Shack in the early 1980s and seeing a large dot-matrix printer outputting a maze on greenbar paper; the printer sat on a cheap printer cart thing that Radio Shack sold, and as the head moved back and forth, it caused the cart to also "flex and sway" with the movement (again - cheap particle board and screws, bad construction, age - all factored in). I think the printer was connected to a TRS-80 Model 3 or 4, IIRC. At the time, I "owned" (parents purchased - and I still have it) a TRS-80 Color Computer 2; which is probably why I was in the store with my Dad, probably buying something for it. It was my first "real computer" (my first "computer" - and introduction to programming - was the controller of the Milton Bradley Big Trak; I still have it, too).
    - te0006 7y ago
      OK, nostalgia time. Growing up behind the iron curtain, my access to electronics was limited. I did own a ZX Spectrum in the early eighties but a printer was out of reach. So I hooked up a russian-built teletype machine to it through a homebrew serial interface. My "printer driver" controlled one bit of a Z80 PIO, and baud rate timing was done by instruction cycle counting. The machine had cyrillic and latin characters but some ASCII special symbols where missing. I fondly remember filing down the peripheral parts of the cyrillic "sh" character (Ж) type to obtain something quite similar to an asterisk. The noise this thing made can only be compared to a jackhammer, but it worked.
taneq 7y ago
MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT MRR MRR MR MR MRRRR MR MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT With little "voop voop" noises in between when it moved without printing or fed more paper. And then you get to pull the tractor holes off the side of the paper. :)
- emayljames 7y ago
  Ahh, pulling the tractor holes! Oh so satisfying. And the green and off white striped paper.
  - duelingjello 7y ago
    I remember the smell of carbonless copy paper from an Okidata dot matrix printer hooked up to an AT&T 6300 (same as Olivetti M24) at my dad’s garage (shop). It’s like an earthy “new car smell,” probably cancer-causing VOCs, but it is what it is.
  - nizmow 7y ago
    Until you're not paying attention and you rip a chunk out of your copy. Ugh.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Not as loud as daisy wheel printer
- smokeyfish 7y ago
  especially a fast industrial daisy wheel that sounds like sustained machine gun fire
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Oh yes I have worked with the big dual head ones - you almost needed ear defenders
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Maybe it is the nostalgia talking but I kind of liked the dot matrix printer sound.

Inkjets came after laser printers. Gary saved us from the rat-tat-tat-tat of the dot matrix printer. Very annoying sound.

by pravda 7y ago

Inkjets came after laser printers. Gary saved us from the rat-tat-tat-tat of the dot matrix printer. Very annoying sound.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

But if there were no lasers I would have probably been paying my monthly tithe to HP forever.

olliej 7y ago
Now there’s just the toner cartels, which also cost vastly more to buy than to make, and aren’t refillable, and also have DRM. HP, Brother, etc haven’t run out of ways to screw us yet :(
- Moru 7y ago
  I usually buy brother because they didn't do that to me so far. But the last ones I bought are still working fine so haven't seen any new developement they did. Are they going the HP way now? When the toner light goes on I just open up, shake it carefully from side to side and stuff it back in. It happily prints another 200 pages before it complains again. HL-1430 is my latest one, it just refuses to die. But all brothers we bought for work is also running way past their expected lifetime. The HP:s on the other hand breaks down all the time.
  - eitland 7y ago
    I still stay away from Brother after having to support a bunch of really annoying Brother laser printers/faxes 15 years ago. Is Brother ok quality these days?

sohkamyung 7y ago

Before laser printers, I believe line printers were the printers of choice for high throughput. But the noise they made would have been incredible.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
You can still buy them[1]. 37 years ago I started my career working on these, they haven't really changed much in between. http://printronix.com/products/line-matrix-en/ http://printronix.com/products/line-matrix-en/
jacquesm 7y ago
Yes, many mainframe shops replaced their line printers with early lasers (which were super expensive, the price only came down after a couple of years).
- kjs3 7y ago
  Yup. At Georgia Tech, they attached a massive Xerox 9700 series laser printer to one of the CDC Cyber 180s (it may have been more complicated connection). It was a few hundred square feet of floor space for the whole install, it could spit out vast amounts of paper, and was pretty finicky to keep running. But (most) everyone liked it better than the equally massive, vastly louder, band printers.
macjohnmcc 7y ago
I used to work for a company that had a band printer. The characters were on a metal band like that in a band saw with duplicates of the letters around the band. The printer would spin that band around and make an imprint. It was incredibly fast and incredibly noisy. The printer had to be in a noise dampening enclosure.
- drfuchs 7y ago
  IBM mainframes in the 70's invariably came with the IBM 1403 high-speed band printer, which pretty much represented the apex of band-printing technology. They printed 132 column, 66 line pages of EBCDIC text at a few seconds per page (depending on how many lines were blank, which characters were being printed, and what band you had installed). They were about the size of a washer and dryer pair, and made a pretty big racket. The computer operators (!) loaded them with special "green band" paper stock that came in boxes about the size of a 12-ream box of printer paper you'd buy at OfficeDepot today, but it was all one big continuous z-fold piece, with sprocket holes down each side for the printer to grab and power it through the paper path. Jobs were printed with special "separator pages" to help to operators find where to split the perforated printouts and deliver them to the right users' collection bins.

rwem 7y ago

I think of the laser as saving us from losing an arm in IBM's variously terrifying chain printers.

themodelplumber 7y ago

Did they rat-tat? I must have just missed those. I remember a lot of high-pitched _reeeee_ sounds, though certainly accompanied by a fascinating crunchy texture. :-)

Darkphibre 7y ago
rat-tat was impact printers (Daisy Wheel, or Character printer), rather than dot-matrix. :) Good grief, that brings back memories. I had one of these as my first printer as a kid, hooked up to an Apple ][e. It shook the table so hard things would fall off. :D https://youtu.be/6gjln8KygG0?t=70 https://youtu.be/6gjln8KygG0?t=70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYRJybnpGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYRJybnpGs
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  They would also disturb the acoustically coupled modems - I recall having to sit an acoustic coupler on a thick piece of foam.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > It shook the table so hard things would fall off. One of my earliest "computer memories" as a kid was being in a Radio Shack in the early 1980s and seeing a large dot-matrix printer outputting a maze on greenbar paper; the printer sat on a cheap printer cart thing that Radio Shack sold, and as the head moved back and forth, it caused the cart to also "flex and sway" with the movement (again - cheap particle board and screws, bad construction, age - all factored in). I think the printer was connected to a TRS-80 Model 3 or 4, IIRC. At the time, I "owned" (parents purchased - and I still have it) a TRS-80 Color Computer 2; which is probably why I was in the store with my Dad, probably buying something for it. It was my first "real computer" (my first "computer" - and introduction to programming - was the controller of the Milton Bradley Big Trak; I still have it, too).
  - te0006 7y ago
    OK, nostalgia time. Growing up behind the iron curtain, my access to electronics was limited. I did own a ZX Spectrum in the early eighties but a printer was out of reach. So I hooked up a russian-built teletype machine to it through a homebrew serial interface. My "printer driver" controlled one bit of a Z80 PIO, and baud rate timing was done by instruction cycle counting. The machine had cyrillic and latin characters but some ASCII special symbols where missing. I fondly remember filing down the peripheral parts of the cyrillic "sh" character (Ж) type to obtain something quite similar to an asterisk. The noise this thing made can only be compared to a jackhammer, but it worked.

taneq 7y ago

MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT MRR MRR MR MR MRRRR MR MRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT With little "voop voop" noises in between when it moved without printing or fed more paper. And then you get to pull the tractor holes off the side of the paper. :)

emayljames 7y ago
Ahh, pulling the tractor holes! Oh so satisfying. And the green and off white striped paper.
- duelingjello 7y ago
  I remember the smell of carbonless copy paper from an Okidata dot matrix printer hooked up to an AT&T 6300 (same as Olivetti M24) at my dad’s garage (shop). It’s like an earthy “new car smell,” probably cancer-causing VOCs, but it is what it is.
- nizmow 7y ago
  Until you're not paying attention and you rip a chunk out of your copy. Ugh.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Not as loud as daisy wheel printer

smokeyfish 7y ago
especially a fast industrial daisy wheel that sounds like sustained machine gun fire
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Oh yes I have worked with the big dual head ones - you almost needed ear defenders

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Maybe it is the nostalgia talking but I kind of liked the dot matrix printer sound.