Things I miss: the music of dot matrix printing

boing
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I totally miss Underwood manual daisy wheel printers. The actual typing sound, the way the keys feel under my fingers, even the smell. Computer typing doesn’t even come close. It doesn’t feel “real” enough to me.

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There was also the smell of the giant boxes of fanfold paper. It probably was attributable to the lignin breaking down into vanillin, but the scent was practically a perfume.

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Eh, I’d like to see a dot matrix do this

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I highly doubt it is carbonless. Unless it is created from some trees from a Star Trek-style planet where they have silicon-based life forms.

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I started out with a 40 lb daisy wheel printer made by Radio Shack that averaged 10-12 words per minute. It was so slow, the THACK! THACK! sound didn’t even blend together. But wait, it gets crazier. Some uber-geek wrote a program that converted it into a dot matrix printer that used one (1) character on the wheel: the period. Until it broke off from fatigue. I never tried it, being a dirt-poor college student with no free time back then.

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With modern printers, you don’t get to rip off the edges and fold them into springs. Best part of printing a long paper for school.

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Yep. Oddly satisfying. Like the machine was eating the paper then excreting something useful. Ah, the good old shits…

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Frickin’ sweet! I love the excrement out of this.

P.S. I watched the entire video.

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30

The timestamps suggest otherwise.

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okay the last few seconds…creeper.

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Did you eat the entire cake/pie?

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Every last bite

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I apologize for not fulfilling my stated obligation of the whole Vimeo.

Wafer-thin mint for you, then?

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I’ve done that. They’re fine, if all you need is upper case letters and numbers and about ten symbols. Not very useful for code listings.

The later Model 33 offers the full 64 character upper-case ASCII set. Still hopeless for printing C code, but fine for FORTRAN IV.

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Now you have no excuse!.

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WHAT

That’s just straight up cruelty.

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38

I believe they’re working on sublicensing their intellectual property.

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39

Now, this video would really impress me if the printer printed out the score while it played it. Multimedia, so to speak…

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40

Maybe its considered cheating… but there are guys here in Germany who designed a MIDI-sontoller for this kind of equipment…

there even is a ‘modem-solo’…

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