Star NX-2420: Color Dot Matrix Printer from 1990 

Totally missed the opportunity to make sure it included "FARTS" too.

i use it for screenshots in gaming lol

so i was going to say something smarmy then i realize i don't think i've /ever/ printed anything with the print screen button X'''D

How old are you? I'm 32,I think I saw the print screen used this way when I was about 7

@@liammhodonohue 31. When I got a pc, Windows 95 was already a thing, so I never had to dive deep into dos

Dot matrix printers were built to last, even the mostly plastic ones, it's amazing how many businesses still use them on a daily basis. I was in a convenience store in the desert on the way to Vegas and this mom and pop operation was doing an inventory printing out a whole box of z food on an old citizen that had to be 30-40 years old.

Absolutely. I've been trying to find old drivers lately and I've found Dell have an excellent website for finding them. Samsung, on the other hand, seem to redirect even direct links to driver downloads to 'DO YOU WANT TO BUY A PHONE' - I had to use the Wayback Machine on their website in the end...

@@BlameThande The Wayback machine is an excellent resource I managed to find drivers from companies that shut down years ago. Seriously saved my butt a few times. The sad thing is how some websites use the robots.txt file to prevent crawlers from indexing the site and the wayback IIRC respects that as well which means some sites are just gone.

@@jackkraken3888 the way the wayback machine 'respects' robots.txt is stupid. It doesn't bother to read and parse the file. It simply uses the presence of such a file to not archive, despite the file much of the time *explicitly permitting archiving* while only excluding *indexing*.

@@greggv8 Oh didn't know that, well that makes it worse, we probably lost all kinds of things in the process.

lol. Yeah, of all the old tech, printers are one of the least useful. Not because of the printers themselves, but because of how all of them have their own specific proprietary kind of printer cartridges...

LGR probably makes the owners of new old stock go crazy! Who else would want obsolete 90s tech?

Dot matrix are still used a lot today strangely?..

@@Steve211Ucdhihifvshi Because you can use them with multi-part forms.

You may laugh, but in my country dot matrix printers are still used for some lottery and billing system and they are still in high demand and are very expensive (as much as a laser). One thing dot matrix printer have is longevity. And even if you don't get the ribbon ink supplied anymore, people just re-ink the existing ones. Those printers using the Epson 9 pin protocol are the most sought at, rest of the specs do not matter as they will be used in that mode for printing bills or such in text only, no bitmaps.

NTDave Geez, I must be a criminal Mastermind. I still use PhotoShop 5 (not CS).

Yeah, I can't even register my copy of CS5 anymore. Pisses me off. Screw Adobe!

Nah nah nah, if I'm paying that much for software I'm using it

I was using my dads 5.0 Photoshop for years (which according to Wikipedia came out in 1998), because I couldn’t afford the program. I remember in high school when we used Photoshop in Visual Arts for a lesson, and I was super confused with the newer program. Unfortunately I’ve had issues on Windows 10 devices with it, and now mainly use Gimp (which I don’t really know how to use, and it feels super limited).

To be honest I’ve tried everything 🤷🏼‍♀️ And its older than the CS programs. I use my friends Creative Cloud atm now anyway, he gets a few devices and let me install Photoshop and a few other Adobe programs on one of my devices.

I used to do this with an Amstrad dot matrix printer on my Amiga, good times!

I did this too once.

Nice!

I used a Star NL-10 for that, but yeah, I had a SimCity poster like that on my wall as a kid

There was a stall on Blackpool pier offering to take your photo and put it on a T-shirt. They had a PC with a dot matrix printer which must have had a T-shirt ribbon on it. They cost a bloody fortune, absolute piss-taking price, bit I suppose that's to offset the rent for the tiny stall, the cost of the PC, and whatever they'd rigged up to connect a video camera to some horrible 1990 or so PC. Won't have been cheap. Unless they nicked it from Granada Studios.

If you can ever find a foot t shirt color ribbon, you should definitely print the LGR logo and put it on some t shirts.

YES

Or printing out at 2am for a paper due that morning, and hoping you don't wake everyone up when printing. Plus you put the printer in Sans Serif or Times Roman and it takes doubly as long to print than in draft mode. So everyone in the house gets to hear the printer even longer!

In college the computers were in the libtary connected to a whole bank of dot matrix printers. Loudest library ever.

If you think that is loud; you should lookup telex machines!

@@marcusdamberger I used to soundproof my dot matrix printer by putting a pillow and sheets on top of it, lol

Being the procrastinator teen that I was I always stayed up late typing up homework for school and had to get up early for about 30 min to turn the computer back on to print out homework and then go back to bed.

A vacation is exactly what i need to start my LGR

ok gud

Have a good vacation fellow viewer!

@@GetsugaTensho85 hay fellow viewer nice to see that you have replayed! these days no one replays to comments

@@syedrasilhussain9552 Why thank you Good Sir! You too!

Eric E Yeah but they were CHEAP and didnt "you printed 1k pages, take me to the service, im on strike". I wish i could buy a dot matrix with usb and cheap ribbon cartridges. With todays technology the speed and quality could be improved quite a bit. Of course its not a laser but if you only care for it to be cheap to operate, dot matrix wins by far.

I don't know, I'm rather surprised how quick it is, especially with text. I mean an inkjet printer isn't faster, although I haven't used on in a while.

@@uselessDM text is fast but anything with graphics takes ages. We used to print out pictures in school back in the 90s on a dot matrix printer. It was fun seeing it move :P

Laharl Krichevskoy you can. Epson still makes Dot Matrix printers, and the new ones come with USB connectors on them. Look up the LQ-590 II. Although the price of the machines themselves seem to have increased significantly since the 90s- I just looked it up and said printer costs US$600. On the plus side, the ribbons are still dirt cheap. US$3 a cartridge. You still save in the long run. Just too bad that gimmicks like color printing are no longer a thing with modern DMPs. My P6300 could print color ISO A2 posters. Many modern printers can’t even do that anymore.

To some extent they're still in use for "specialty applications", which is why they're still in production. I see them most frequently at stores that still need to print carbon-copy sales invoices. Laser printers and inkjet printers obviously can't print carbon copies, but a tractor-feed dot matrix printer is perfect for that application.

How old are you? I'm 32 I can remember my uncle gave us a Epson LQ860 (mentioned in video) he used print screen. I remember printing out pages copied from Encarta back in 1997 for school homework. I had read what I copied on subject of television - teacher clearly knew I not only didn't write it but didn't understand it either. Very important life lesson :)

My work computers with win7 do the same function. Print Screen prints to the laser printer whatever is on the screen.

@@liammhodonohue I'm 42 and grew up with DOS but had no idea about the Print Screen key actually having that function.

Also a testament to all of us LGR fans being huge nerds 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

This printer was great though it was my first color printer

Honestly fr. I'm a 26 yr old woman. Usually my colleagues are watching tik toks or make up tutorials but LGR's videos are what I watch in my spare time. Or... actually what I listen to while falling asleep each night. Kudos to you, man. You're the reason why I'm a huge obsolete compute nerd now XD You sparked my secret hobby and your commentary is just a freaking delight to hear

I agree with you Ann 💯 😎

absolutely, yes good!

@IHaveSwatches Before the dark times. Before the Y2K.

There's just something about this channel that makes me fascinated about things I don't otherwise find interesting 😄😄😄

Dot matrix printers are interesting period.

Idk technology connections might be able to

Stuart Ashen could make it interesting, but Clint does a much better job.

especially really really really slow printers :)

His name isn't LGR! LOL

That's why his parents didn't say "LGR stop printing banners!"

They kept the camera shutter sound even on modern smartphones, why didnt they keep the classic bootup noises on modern computers, right?

I don't miss broken mechanics at all...

The first PC build I had that was nearly silent was a sight to behold. I was so proud of it. It still had fans, but they were 120mm and temperature controlled, it still had HDDs, but they were on anti vibration pads and the PSU was a semi passive unit. The first time I appreciated having activity LEDs in the case front. I really don't miss the old noises, because everytime they changed a bit, I was very worried about potential failures. More anxiety inducing than relaxing.

@Zenas Starchild I thought the same thing

Buy a disk drive.

I have Pirates Booty and apple juice

Bwahaha

The ponts get added during the Paper Feed Faths.

Pont means point/dot in my language

They certainly did, I remember having an OKI data printer from about 1993 im guessing that would absolutely scream through pages, all the noises that thing made, you could be across the house and go, oh its printing now, wait thats the loading paper sound, thats the ink transport moving. Mine even had a "silent" mode which in all fairness made it quieter but what it really did was just make the printer go slower to try and make it quiet, not silent still louder than a riced up honda doing 100 but quieter than a jet airliner from 3 feet away like it usually was. Stark contrast to my current lineup of computer data to paper creation devices, my Brother laser jet color printer also has a silent mode which weirdly makes it no louder than a fan on low speed, and i have an epson photo all in one that doesnt even need a quiet mode cause really its noises are very subtle, its nice being able to hear when im printing something, but i miss the sounds the OKI made

airplane downnnnn

I'M NOT CLAUDE FROLLO ANYMORE that’s sounds like pure a e s e t h i c

OMG printing out stuff was a real pain in the ass during the early 90s :D In my country, I remember that some of the salary slips were printed out to staff with matrix printers even in 2008 :) Tili tuli, tili meni ^__^

I still have a Commodore MPS 801 for my C64 around, with a fresh ink ribbon I bought on eBay. That one prints with the returning head as well :)

We had a Brothers electronic typewriter that had a connection allowing you to hook you up to a computer. Connection though required a separate box that had a parallel connection. And then we use another adapter to go from the parallel to Commodore 64 serial. Worked pretty good.

Traitor ;)

When we did mailings at my first job, we'd just hook up a box of adres label traction paper, schedule the printjob for 8pm and go home. It was usually done the next morning, but not always.

Me too

Me too....me too =P

For me this brings back memories of using my old TRS-80 Model III and its LPRINT command along with my Tandy printer (don't remember the model) and fanfold paper to make big banners. I made the entire alphabet, each letter a full 8-inches tall, using just the asterisk character.

Print Shop Deluxe is super nostalgic for me, too. We used to make banners with it for EVERYTHING, because we could. My mom was always super into running events like parties, the local science fair, dances, and more for the school so we just printed banners for everything. We kept the dot matrix even after we got a "laser printer" just for the continuous sheets of paper.

I was similarly fortunate growing up in the 80s as I tended to go through a 2500 sheet box of fanfold paper pretty much every month.

@@gakk8658 That's awesome!. Yeah my parents were super active with us as well and often volunteered to cook the hotdogs for all our cub scouting events. That usually including making a banner haha. Yeah My dad had to have everything. We had a laser printer too and a giant flatbed scanner and I would spend hours scanning my baseball cards in and manipulating them. The coolest thing I thought I ever did was print out a full size sheet on adhesive paper and stick it to the front of my card binder. I still have it to this day. All of his PC purchases were for pleasure as far as I knew. He bought it just because he wanted it and because he could. I definitely inherited that trait. Haha.

@Deenie Beenie my understanding of German is that it's a lot more common to just use compound words as names for specific things, whereas in English this is considerably less common

THAT is sperg excellence, sperg MAGIC. I love it.

Totally didn't realize that's why the ribbon was turned over like that, makes sense! I thought in the ensuing years it had somehow gotten twisted over.

Happy birthday!

happy birthday!

happy birthday, internet stranger! hope it goes nicely.

Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday. I, too, was born in 1990. Are you feeling old? Because where's my medication?

Now, just what is your profile picture? I remember having a gameboy game with that character on its cover...

@@highcolor_sunz , Ganbare Goemon , an old game series on the snes & n64 :D

I know offices that still use them today!

Damn I wasted paper on that 😂 lol

The year 2000 will be 20 years ago soon.

Yup, try that with 1980...

Technically, the 90s as a whole are still closer to 20 years ago, and will be until next year.

what's hard for me to grasp is that the 90's are even farther back to my nephew as the 60's were to me. damn!

I thought 50's doesn't event exist

VORSICHT HEISS I guess it was also sold in Germany

Dot matrix stuck around because it was used for multipart printing ("carbon copies"), which other printers did not support.

jeff absolutely, I still remember one of the companies having the printer mounted to the wall with the endless folded carbon copies printing all day.

I kinda knew that, but on the other hand I didn't think that was still a feature found in the late versions of dos. (like the 6.21 you usually got alongside windows 3.11)

Ha ha! Yeah, I remember that now. In elementary school it was impressed on us to never, ever, EVER hit print screen accidentally.

I knew about the PrintScreen thing, but I never new about Ctrl+PrintScreen! And I was brought up in the DOS days!

Did you print out (non-)apology letters.

Gotta say I remember printers being loud but wow that thing is irritating and took forever.

Star LC24-10 was my first. I once printed the PovRay documentation using it. Took ages on endless computer paper.

I had exactly the same thought. No way my dad spent £300 on a printer. But I clearly remember ca 1992 having a 24 pin colour Star dot matrix printer and being frustrated that my dad would only ever put a mono ribbon in it.

Star made a wide range of printers. The 9-pin non-colour ones were much cheaper, with a range going down to the cheapest end. Although even the cheap ones weren't actually cheap, just less horrifying prices. Same for all printers, before they adopted the horrendous inkjet "ink more expensive than gold" racket. Maybe Clint could let you look at his Star catalogue, or more likely it's available scanned online. Maybe even Star's website will have a picture of it. Back in the day, a colour laser would cost as much as a small house.

@@greenaum 0:55 Going back and looking at this, I think it is more likely that my family owned the NX-1020, which looked virtually the same, and was only $329.

Hey, it saved (quite a few) lines of code and thus bytes on the cartridge/BBS transfer or what have you. KISS!

What was the game name?

nick turner I can't remember. I do remember it was more a collection of games, and included a snake clone. And, when you died, it would say something like "Your googolpede ran into a wall" while playing funeral march music.

Same here. I had an Amiga, but I had a colour 24 pin Star printer. I'm not sure if it was the one in the video, but it was very similar if not.

Especially if you got the really expensive stuff which was creme coloured with a vellum like texture to it. We got it cheap from bankruptcy auctions. You just cut the corporation's pre-printed letterhead off the top after you were done printing.

Oh yes. Even _I_ was a kid when that came out, and I'm fuckin' ancient compared to most people here. In the UK, so it was the obligatory Amstrad PC1512 or 1640 (models with 512K or 640K RAM). The power supply was in the monitor to save money, so you could only ever use the same monitor, graphics card, etc. They weren't made to be infinitely expandable, though I think they had ISA slots to add this or that. Mostly used as out-of-the-box computers, everything you need right in there. This one was in a local community centre that was always busy in our community, good times. And with a dot matrix printer of course, what else was there? I got a bit of time alone on the PC, doing the odd banner. At school we had a colour inkjet, I think the famous one that came out first, can't remember it's name, and ours might have been a rebadge. AFAIK it was never used, ever, not even once. It was just that important and expensive. Wasn't even on the network I kept wrecking. We had a school assembly where the kids were told if they saw me on a computer, to report to a teacher at once! It wasn't really hacking, just dicking about with neglected options, and things like the DOS version of MS-WORD having a "Jump" command that let you into DOS in an otherwise semi-secured system. There was no security on the system, really, except by obscurity, and the two women in charge of it were completely daft and hopeless. So becoming their nemesis at 11 years old only took some curiosity and a little bit of brain power. If I could know then what I know now, just the bit about DOS would be enough. Well that was a good emptying of my nostalgia glands, thanks for reading!

My family has an old inkjet that's lasted through three computers and is still going. Meanwhile, the inkjet I got so my mom could print from her iPad… the black didn't want to print and my attempts to fix it didn't work.

The reliability of it's Catridge is just just.. seriously bad.

A lot of home printers seem to suck. Esp HPs

True, a lot of warehouses and stuff use them. For printing on forms that use carbon paper (or the weird chemical stuff), you have to use an impact printer, that actually hits the paper. Dot matrix or daisywheel are the only options, and daisywheels were expensive and rare. So switching to another printer would mean they'd have to redesign all their forms, and the ones of the businesses they deal with. It's fortunate that, as long as you keep them clean, dot matrix printers are indestructible.

This was my childhood!