http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
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Back in ye olde 90’s… maybe 00’s, i had a printer that would do this. And if you dimmed the screen via the monitor settings you could trick the printer into printing. Something to do with how the driver was tied to monitor color settings? I don’t know but it was an odd workaround, and i don’t know how we discovered that.
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Heh.
I was going to make a joke about just going back to dot matrix printers, and I find that you can still buy ribbons for my old Star LC24-200 from ye olde early 90s for $6.
Although drivers for anything post Win 98 might be tricky.
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I got curious - the built-in ghostscript driver epsonc works.
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Not far enough back – daisy wheel is the way to go!
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Well, y’all can buy Teletypewriters on eBay. No lower case, though… Still, I’d think a Teletypewriter would be a good way to print out your twitter feed, no HP ink needed.
How about something like this?
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Maybe if it had a speaker that could make loud Teletype printing noises…
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Third-party ribbons for Imagewriters are still in production. Probably there are enough old dot-matrix printers still in use for carbon-copy purposes to make it worth it… likely in industrial settings where upgrading one aspect necessitates unacceptable downtime and maybe having to expensively upgrade the whole rest of the process as well. Ghostscript drivers for them exist (no color support but whatever,) as do USB-serial adapters.
We still have lab equipment that use form-feed dot matrix printers…
I’ve seen them used in some airports. Last i saw some was about 5 or 6 years ago
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Still used at the auto parts chain down the street from me…
Open home printers to the mechanical standard of 1996 (the most recent year mechanical patents would have expired) don’t sound too bad. What am I missing?
I like the irony that, at the bottom of that long comic devoted to printer hate, there’s an ad for a poster of said comic.
Irony would be an ad for a printer so you could print the poster yourself.
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Still a healthy market for them, Epson and OKI are the two main suppliers. They are cheap to run, reliable and do NCR duplicates.
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Back in the 1960s and 1970s IBM was the defendant in a lot of anti-trust suits. Some of these were by manufacturers of peripherals which were intended to be plug compatible with IBM systems. The courts ruled that changing interfaces without any technological purpose was an anti-competitive action. They also forced IBM to publish the interface specifications and pay damages to the third-party manufacturers. Perhaps someone who know anti-trust law really well can explain why this doesn’t apply in the case of ink cartridge interfaces to printers.
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Brother. I have one in my office, one at home, one in storage at my in-laws that I use when I visit, and one I bought one for my son. The oldest is over 15 years old and still works a treat, if a little slow by modern standards. My father was a Brother dealer 45 years ago (not computer printers, obviously) and they were a stand-up company that put on good dinner spreads for their dealers (and their kids), so I’m a little biased.
I also have a nice Toshiba dot-matrix in my office, however I haven’t tried it since I upgraded the office machine to Windows 7 from W2K (last year), so I don’t know if there are drivers for it.
Our printer at home is on the same electrical circuit as the stereo system, which however also uses a line conditioner, with undervoltage protection provided by step-up transformers and mechanical relays. Every time we print something you can hear the relays in the conditioner kicking on.
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I’m sure @Jerry_Grasso would be more than happy, seems like he has free time on his hands.
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Brother Laser is my go to recommendation when people ask my opinion.
My 5-6 year old Brother 4040CDN keeps on trucking. Still on the same original toners. I did do the “tape over the sensor port on the cartridge” so it would keep printing black, but that was 4 years ago.
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