Marcel Krebs my HP printer from 2004 is still printing/scanning/copying perfectly and trust me : it has printed a huge amount of papers (more than a lot of home printers I think)
Marcel Krebs and I hate Canon printers, they are really bad compared to the others I think. Buy a Brother one instead I have one and it's working perfectly over wifi with every device
Dot Matrix Printers are built to operate in enviornments in which other printers would have already seize their operation. They might not be built with the Homeuser in mind, but logistic companies, and many doctors rely on it still (logistic because of the ability to use those neverending paper boxes....).
Marcel Krebs My Lexmark x544 is still going after 5 years, but the laser printing rolls have lines on them, and I have replacement ones on the way. Cartridges last like 2 years of home use.
You missed the point of how the greeting card printout is laid out. You're supposed to fold the paper in half and then in half again. Then the two images on the page become the front cover and inside of the greeting card.
Yes that was so hilarious to watch Druaga1 grabbing those scissors, like WTF! That damn thing is served you perfectly easy and convenient way. There's no need to do anything more than folding, dude! :D
the select button is necessary in this case because the amount of pixels being fed into the drum are causing sub pixels to separate and fill in the ribbon combobulator, counteracting with the head movement. 35 polarized neutrons later, and thats why you need to press select.
my family had one of these. used it into the early 2000s to print checks for bills. once we found out the ribbons were stopping to be produced, and could just run them through the laserwriter IIg instead, we did that. then someone ran a glitter card through the laserwriter. I miss both these printers dearly.
If I'm not mistaken, you can just push the select button as soon as the paper is in the printer, so that the printer just starts printing when you send something to it. Also, the card is made so you can fold it, instead of having to cut it all out. I know because I used to fiddle with a program quite identical to this, back in the days. Much love
My best memory of these printers is the sound it makes when you first turn it on, the head moving to the left and then it adjusts the ribbon. The sound at 1:46. Yours sounds a little different than I remember. 4th grade my school had these apple machines the IIe and IIGS computers. We used the continuous sheet type paper the kind with the holes on the sides. I like how you never had to worry about ink, just having enough paper. Nowadays it's the other way around.
8bitguy or vwestlife maybe.... This linus guy is way to establishment for my taste. And he doesn't even reside close to druaga1 I guess (it was Canada for Linus right?)
"Dude, it's 2 in the morning, aren't you tired?" Tired? What's tired? "Tired is what happens when you don't go to sleep." Tired sound great! Let's be tired!
Druaga1, There is a device made by Asante called the AsanteTalk, which will bridge LocalTalk/AppleTalk device to standard Cat5e ethernet. So that's one way to get this ImageWriter II networked. Another more difficult convoluted way would be to have a newer model Mac (say the Power Mac 7500, for example) connected to the ImageWriter II via AppleTalk and then connect the 7500 to Ethernet and either have Apple's LocalTalk to Ethernet Bridge 2.0.x software extension loaded in the System Folder or have Mac OS 8 or later installed. The Mac OS will take print traffic from Ethernet and send it to the ImageWriter II automatically. The only thing you'll need left to do is tell any other computer on your network (Mac, Windows or Linux) to send print traffic to the 7500's IP address and make sure those other computers have the ImageWriter II driver installed. So, either way you go, it will work.
The Dotmatrix Printers are still in use, cause most printer manufacturers seized production of new devices years ago, but in many countries due to legal restrictions (a real secound original is only achievable with such a Dotmatrix printer...). And dotmatrix printers are very good in operating at steady workloads or in tough (cold) conditions.
I hope you continue doing videos about this machine, the sound of it reminds me of my childhood, as my elementary school (a technology magnet school) never bothered to upgrade their computers and computer hardware from windows 95 machines and apple image writer 2s until well into 2008 after I moved on to middle school where they upgraded to windows vista machines, and they still have an image writer or two left in service (how they still have ribbon for them I will never know)
Both that printer and that mac reminds me of when I was little and in Elementary school in the 80s. We used some of these macs as well as Apple IIe computers. All of the macs as well as most of the apple IIs had these Image writer IIs hooked up to them. Ahhh the memories.
Honestly I know that a ton of people have already done the whole dot matrix on modern machine thing, but I would love to see your spin on it. You have an absurdly unique style with computing videos that keep me coming back. You are actually entertaining.
Druaga, I think the Select button is for selecting the active printer, if the serial port is an RS485 then there can be multiple devices attached to the same port and to choose which one is the active one you must use the select button, so no need to select each time, just power it on, press select and let it be selected all the time (if I'm not wrong, but I can be :P)
The "Select" button would tell the computer which printer you wanted to use, so back in the olden days of daisy-chaining printers for images and text, you could choose which one you wanted at that particular time. It could also be used to let you service the printer while it was still powered on so that the document you were trying to print wouldn't get lost. The printer ribbons were actually just plastic film with carbon coating, it's pretty easy to fix them if they're losing their color and they're not too overused or if you can't find another ribbon to put in. You *really* shouldn't turn the paper backwards, it's better to form feed the paper out, since that can damage the ribbon and even the print head in some cases. Line feed steps to the next line, while Form feed goes to the next form section. The lightness is because you've got it in draft mode, put it on any other setting and it'll look much darker. But... while I hate to admit it, Billy Mayes is finally done. Died of a heart attack. Anything Okidata is a tank of a printer, and anything Apple made before October 2011 is pretty high quality. A Raspberry Pi won't be able to print to it.
That was awesome. Couldn't afford that printer back in the day. I had an Apple Scribe printer that functioned similarly but used a thermal print head so it was a quasi dot matrix laser printer thing. Hated the sound of dot matrix printers back in the day and yet now it's strangely nostalgic.
They still sell continuous paper that you can use with this printer. I just got 2400 pages for my Image Writer II for ~$30. It's 9.5" x 11" which is a little odd. But it works good.
That greeting card... you were supposed to fold it along the breadth and then along the length. The outside would automatically be outside and the inside will fold itself inside. You then just use glue to paste the betweens. You cutting it did drive me up the wall.
The new MacBook Pro doesn't have parallel or serial ports (and the new Mac OS X doesn't even support them anymore), so that's a case where it's completely impossible. Windows and Linux could do it on an IBM-compatible PC, but a modern Mac has no support for Apple's own products from yesteryear.
That printer with a colour ribbon is able to print in colour. Quick look on Ebay and you can still buy the colour ribbons for them for $23ish (USD) from the US. So theres something else you can do with it Druaga.
if you examine a printout of something printed by this printer with a microscope, you'll notice a little serial number. This is a measure to catch people counterfeiting money with this printer.
My Dad claimed that new ribbons for dot matrix printers were ruinously expensive, so even though we *had* a printer we were never actually allowed to use it. Love the dot matrix sound! I'd say it reminds me of being a kids and printing shit pictures, but like i said, Dad never let us actually use it.
There is a COM port even on modern Skylake motherboards. So it's probably possible to print modern Microsoft Word 2016 documents in this... Pixel art? Matrix art?..
Mac Plus 1MB, SCSI Everex external HDD the size of 4 VCR's, two external 3 1/4" FDD's, Original Image Writer, Image Writer II, So many software titles, as this whole package of Mac goodness came about 10 years after the computers release, second hand, by a local Mac enthusiast. I was also about ten at the time of obtaining the system, maybe less...Maybe neither the system nor myself was anymore than 7 or 8 years old... Hard to say, I wasn't old enough to care. Anyway, this was my first home computer. While the schools had Apple II's and LC III's, I had the Mac Plus... Something in between the two, far far far better than the Apple II, yet elusively not as capable as the LC III (or II, or I, which were also in schools peppered around)... First computer I went online with was an LC III with an external modem and some early variant of Netscape Navigator. But yeah, Image Writer II.... Awesome printer... You need the correlated paper with the holes on the edges ... that you need to rip off after.
