A 9-pin dot matrix printer (Oki Microline 321) printing out a test page on a low quality setting. This is a farly large (and heavy) A3 format capable printer. Please comment, rate and subscribe!
Hearing it in action is giving me flashbacks of being back in elementary school where the coolest day of the week was being in the computer lab and listening to these printers in action. Good stuff.
Love the sound of that!!!!!! Great computer printer!!!!!! I happen to love dot matrix, LaserJet and photo printers!!!!!! Computers are the most awesome invention/innovation and I love them!!!!!! I love computers (just to simplify it)!!!!!! Computers are the best!!!!!! Greatest tool in the history of both productivity and mankind!!!!!!
That sound, the sound of the dial-up internet modem connecting, the sound of the VHS recorder head drum spinning up and the tape lacing, and the high pitched whine of a tube TV's horizontal retrace.
Or trying to go on the internet at 2:00 AM to watch Apache Sunrise Dances and having to put the pillow next to the computer case, not to mention the hours spent downloading a postage stamp quality MS Video 1 video.
Can't believe I miss this stuff. We had a few of these mothballed at the storage room on my first job, and they came out once per year to print a massive report.
Man, I really needed that. I feel like I'm 12 again, listening to my mother print her endless meeting notes for the next day in the middle of the night.
I had to look this up because as I'm watching my 3D printer create an entire sculpture with nothing but a little fan noise I am astounded how far printing has come in my relatively short life.
In the early 90s, we were one of the very few families with a computer (packard bell) and we had a dot matrix printer. I liked the sound and would print out my name in jumbo sized letters with hearts.
Ah, the 80's / 90's. When I would beg my grandpa to let me write and print out my terrible childhood stories on his computer, then bounce eagerly by the printer as it spooled out my ideas. Thanks for the nostalgia.
The good thing about these printers aside from printing on carbon copy papers is that when the ink runs out it doesn't just up an quit all at once like an inkjet printer, instead the print gradually gets lighter and lighter.
@@derkommissar4986 Not sure how this is so hard… hat’s why your printer warns you before it does. Kinda like water filters, car gas tanks, soap in bottles, toothpaste, soda bottles, oxygen in scuba tanks…starting to see a life trend here.
brings back memories! looks like the exact model of printer we had in high school, remember that sound printing my homework and having to tear off the strips on the side of the paper :)
The memories of the public school system. Everywhere else were using quiet laser printers in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, and we had to use these hell raisers to print out assignments. Good times…
Omg I remember growing up as a kid with one of these printers. My dad used it all the time, it was in the living room but I remember it being way louder lol
my mom worked in accounted at an office and would bring me with as a toddler, and my god that sound is something that brought me right back! when they finally got a modern printer, everyone there was so happy, because that dot matrix printer would basically never stop running
I come here to compare the sound of this printer to Benjamin the cockatiel's printing sounds, and I see Danny Sexbang jokes.. What a small world this is lolol
I’m writing a book set roughly in the 80s’, and this has helped a lot in my descriptions of someone printing something out. Now, how the heck do I spell screechy... oh, yes, it’s in the comments on this video.
Using software I wrote in Visual Basic, I managed to get a partial reconstruction of the printed page, just from the sound of the printer. I found 2 problems preventing me from getting a better reconstruction. 1) It seems that for each column of each character printed, all 8 or 10 pins in the print head fire simultaneously, not sequentially. 2) The duration of each line or characters (or strip of an image) is not always exactly the same (only approximately the same), though it contains the exact same number of columns of ink. Problem one means I can't reconstruct actual letters that are one character high, as there is no way to separate the pixels vertically within each character. Problem two means that for a sound card (which uses a constant sample rate) the lines take slightly different durations, so the page content appears "wavy" in the reconstructed image. I assume that the print head knows where it is on the page, by some kind of positional encoder in the stepper motor, so it has no problem printing exactly. The low quality reconstruction I was able to get can be seen at i.imgur.com/6WbGcjW.png
That's cool...another thing to try would be using a PLL or some sort of frequency demodulation to use the high pitch whine of the pins firing to discipline the speed at which the virtual carriage draws the dots on the page, but that would definitely be an extra-credit assignment. Someone once also ran a program on a computer that wasn't connected to the internet and made it so it would do ridiculous amounts of calculations and discard the result, then at other times sleep so that the CPU fan would change speed and with a mobile phone elsewhere in the room be able to receive coded messages. I think it was called 'fansmitter'.
I went to a small school and I graduated 2 years ago and as I remember we still had 3 of these as well as a fax machine. I used to pop floppy disks into the computer we had.
Yeah the song of bureaucracy. You can't deny, but I do like the sound of it. The melody it brings in those times the dollar signs it'd be printing …...and still do... what more late at night for those who works round the clock .
Love it. Would give anything to hear this in place of that dreaded Microsoft teams incoming call tone... sends shivers down my spine for a moment before I swiftly cut it off 😂
perfect video, exactly what i came to see. i used to watch that little bar the whole time, and i did this time too. it amazed me then, still amazes me now.
I remember sometimes after printing something on a dot matrix, the paper would still be too low inside the machine to remove. We have to push a button to feed out some more of the paper so you could get a grip and safely tear off the printed sheets at the perforation. However, sometimes the controls would go haywire and the printer wouldn't stop rolling out the paper. I remember desperately pushing buttons trying to get it to stop, but it wouldnt. Eventually I'd quietly slink away while it was still going and the entire ribbon of paper was winding up on the floor.
Oh, maybe this is why so many people my age were into Dubstep for a while. Nostalgia? Personally, I never could stand the sound of 5 of these things going off at once in our computer lab in elementary school. It would take what seemed like an entire class for everyone's prints to finish. XD
They had several of these at the uni library my mum worked in, memories of summers in the computer rooms playing solitaire and kids chat rooms with the constant noise of a dozen of these printing everything under the sun for all the students and staff.
That's exactly the model that's used at my place of employment, every time you take the paper out, you have to re-adjust so that the text won't be printed in the wrong spots
I printed those giant banners using Print Shop that spanned 10 or 15 pages or more. After printing you'd unfold them and hang them on the wall. "Happy Birthday" or, more likely, some prank involving curse words that a friend would see in giant letters on the wall after walking in the door.
I honestly think it's 50/50 soothing and awful. The sound of the ink cartage going back and forth sound like a metronome. The buzzing sounds like something I don't want to hear before bed LOL
I remember in IT class in the mid 90s me & a mate were messing about with Excel. We ended up wasting a whole pack of paper on LaserJet printer. Our teacher went ballistic! 😂
We used to use these to print Blockbuster membership cards back in the day. We had more issues with the fancy new laser printer than we did with this tank.
Remember being at school in the computer lab. A bunch of apple computers and 1 Imagewriter 2 served 25 computers. And when we had reports to print out. MANNN. You better hope you were high in the queue or your were waiting a few minutes. That thing was causing a ruckus for a good 10 minutes.
I'm here because I was reading a parts inventory sheet in a turbine maintenance manual from 1995. I told the guy I was working with I could hear these pages being printed. He didn't know what I 2as talking about.
I met the man who wrote the code that made the dot matrix printer print in both directions. “Bi-directional” The original only printed in one direction then it would move back to the left side of the page and print the next line. He said he sold the patent to IBM for about $400 way back in the day. He lives here in Las Vegas.
Why didn’t printer companies come up with this before? As it would have printed more than 2 times faster. Or I guess they wanted to make it work like a typewriter.
