Hum. Daisy wheel could not have worked for the amount of copies needed. I want to say ‘impact printer’ but not sure that is a correct term.
The optimist in me hopes that “production area” is the demonstration part of the local ‘Antiques in Informatics’ museum?
But the realist in me fears that it not…
Good luck!
It is. My brain retains a lot of useless information from the Before Times.
Impact printers basically came in two types - either an array of pins smashed the inked ribbon against the paper, or something similar to a traditional IBM selectric typewriter head smashed the ink against the paper.
Array of pins on a print head that moves back and forth = dot matrix. The sound could peel paint off the wall, but it was reasonably fast, very cheap, and could sortof do graphics. If you used a bunch of small pins (24?) it could almost pass for letter quality. Institutions that needed multipart forms didn’t care about letter quality and mostly went for the faster, cheaper, but MUCH crappier looking 8-pin models (Those numbers feel right but I could not swear to them in court, it’s been too long).
8.5" wide line of pins that stood still while the paper moved past them = line printer. Wicked fast, but seriously expensive because it had so damn many pins.
IBM selectric-style print head = Daisy wheel printer. Slow as snot, could not do graphics, and (while it doesn’t seem possible) they were even louder than a dot matrix, but the output was letter quality and it could do triplicate forms just as well as a dot matrix.
I think daisy wheel printers are extinct. I have no idea if line printers are still made these days. Dot matrix are definitely still made and used by banks and such places with a deep, dark fetish for forms in triplicate. It seems like a ton of engineering effort over the past 30 years has been devoted to making the damn things whisper quiet, but I suspect it’s mostly a lot of acoustic foam and other sound proofing techniques to keep the banshee wail of the print head confined within the body of the printer.
ETA: I forgot to mention the other kind of daisy wheel printer, the one that gave its name to the category. Imagine taking the arms that strike the paper off an old manual typewriter, and then welding them onto a small circle so they are arranged like the petals of a daisy. Do that, but make the arms out of plastic, and you have a daisy wheel print head. The wheel would spin to the correct letter, and then a hammer would punch the arm against the ribbon and paper. It had all the virtues and all the vices of a Selectric-style printer, until the wear and tear of the arms flexing too many times caused the lower case “e” to break off. I presume that it was invented to bypass certain patents on the Selectric style printers, which in my limited experience were far less prone to breaking.
ETA2: I suppose technically the selectric style print heads were called ball printers, but I always called all of them daisy wheels.
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Thank you kindly. While functional, at least in medical or legal (ok, scratch that), my mind is seriously swimming in a pig slurry (I just love that term for pig shit) of alternate facts. Uh. Can you help?
Too late! Wrong!! The answer is 'NO".
Windows 95 … electron app
Two great tastes, now together.
If it ain’t broke, dont fix it is very much the mantra. Some of our computers still run straight-up MS-DOS. Fairly simple things that just do simple routines such as voltage measurements during test and nothing more.
We had to do a gyrations a number of years ago to add all these computers to the network for continuous virus scans and auditing. These computers posed no security risk. The computers have no LAN connections, no serial interface, no USB, 16k of RAM and only a floppy drive for transferring data. We had to add so much hardware to get them to a point where they could be scanned that the security risk was increased and we were only scanning the newly-installed components. Colossal waste of time.
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Just for the record:
That app is an emulator, which is itself written in Javascript. Each of these, taken by itself, is already the opposite of “native”.
You could ask questions like
- “is this native Windows 95 or is it an emulator?”
- “is this a native app or is it written in Javascript?”
Sorry I had nothing of value to contribute this time. Just irks me when technical terms are used to mean the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to mean.
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