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Today, most households with a home PC probably also have a printer that is capable of printing full colour near photo quality pictures, and we kind of take it for granted. Most will own an ink jet style printer that cost less than 100 pounds (probably less than 50 pounds) and we tend to take it for granted really.
As recently as the 1980s though this would have almost have been deemed witchcraft! Back then printers cost as much, if not more, than the computer they were connected to, and you were often limited to a mere handful of printers that your home computer could actually connect to (it was no doubt made by the company that made your computer too).
If you did have access to a printer back then, be it at home, work or school, chances are it was a dot matrix printer. These printers worked in a similar manner to a typewriter. Mounted on a rail inside the printer was the print head, which was a little device that had a row of pins that could each be pushed out individually.
The pins were fired out at speed towards an inked ribbon which was just in front of the paper. The pins pushed the ribbon against the paper and thus left a dot on the paper. The pins retracted, the print head then moved a small distance along the rail, and a different selection of pins would fire out. By varying which pins were pushed forward, characters could be printed on the paper.
Whilst this is pretty clever, there were several drawbacks. Firstly, being a mechanical operation limited the speed at which the printer could operate, so dot matrix printers were often slow.
Secondly, the act of firing out the pins made them quite noisy.
Thirdly, you were limited by how many pins the print head could have, which affected the quality of the final print out. Probably the most common arrangements were to have 9 or 24 pins on the print head.
Fourthly, at least initially most dot matrix printers couldn’t handle printing on individual sheets of paper, so instead you had to have a great big box of continuous paper that had little holes running down each side. The little holes were used to pull the paper through the printer, as they were attached to a couple of little sprocket wheels. Sometimes this paper had little green lines printed across it so that it was easier to see the individual lines of printed text.
Most dot matrix printers were also only capable of printing in black and white, but they could at least print graphics as well as text since the printer driver just had to fire out the correct arrangement of pins.
Colour dot matrix printers were also available though, and these worked by having a ribbon with the four printing colours on (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). The ribbon could be moved up and down so that the pins of the print head were all behind a particular colour, and by printing the line four times using the different parts of the ribbon a colour image could be created, although it was by no means photographic quality.
Ink jet printers may make this system look archaic now, but the good old dot matrix printer isn’t quite ready to keel over and die just yet. They still have an admittedly diminishing role in the modern world, as any business that uses multi-part carbonated stationery on a regular basis will tell you.
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I have had a few dot matrix printers mainly epson,citizen etc, it was great when they became cheap second hand in the mid 90s as they are perfect for writing letters or printing out music/guitar tab off the net, they were amazingly cheap to run and some I had, you could drill a hole in the ribbon cartridge and top it up with ink from the stationers. Inkjets are such a rip off and I cant imagine why anyone would want to us ethem for printing photos, they are so ink intensive, you can go to trueprint and get your prints done much cheaper, i use them for prints of some of my photographic work, and if I want real quality I also use photobox too. dot matrix printers are so awesome though, my last one got a paperjam though and I damaged the pins pulling it out. I also had an olympia typewriter which was very good too
I also remember articles in some computer magazines that showed you how to make a rudimentary scanner by attaching some sort of photocell to the printhead, cant remember if it was in one of the commodore magazines or one of the weeklies like popular computing weekly, there were two small weekly magazines in the 80s, I think popular computer weekly had a comic strip at the back with a character called pi-man in it, you could buy an adventure game where you searched for the golden sundial of pi and could actually win it if you solved it, it was a take off, of that book where you could find a gold and jewelled hare I think the guy who wrote that was called kit williams or something. I started off with a zx81 in 84 it was a special offer in WH smith you got it in a pack with a 16k ram pak for £39.99, I alater got a dragon 32, vic 20,spectrum 48k rubber keyboard,commodore C16, sony hit bit msx, another dragon, and in 1989 attained the ultimate the C64. I managed to get demos’s for the C64 via mail order through a commodore magazine, they were real good, similar to what you would find on an amiga but in 8 bit, I also joined ICPUG, international commodore/pet user group, I got a copy of geos a wimp (windows icon mouse pointer) os for the 64 and a 1541 hard drive. I then got an amiga, not as much fun as Ithought though, then got an atari st which was a real computer, got online on some BBS’s and explored the JANET (joint academic network) you could hop onto it via pads from various dial up university numbers. I also had timeworks ( a desktop publishing programme) for it. I then got an amstrad luggable forget what they are called now massive thing it was, then a series of faceless pc’s, now I finally have an apple, what I always lusted for although not the mac i lusted for in 1984 with the big brother ad. I liked apple II’s as well but they were so expensive you had to be very posh to have one in the 80s. some computers i remember but didnt have were, sord m5, memorex ? in a case not dismilar to the c64, tatung einsteing, various amstrad cpc, jupiter ace, osbourne 1 which Iused on YTS, bbc b and acorn electron, sam coupe, various realistic’s from the coco to the trs 80, apricots, the sharp mz something with a little built in tape deck/printer, I did have an atari portfolio which ran dos and microsft basic in a handheld size package, and some psion organisers of the 2 and 4 line variety which you often spied being used in marks and spencers. tv program to watch was whiz kids , a lad who i think was called richie hacked into various establishments fighting crime with his gang and a robot he made. there was also a tv program probably with fred harris in it, wargames the novel and the film were required reading and watching, i remember an episode of “the scarecrow and mrs king (housewife joins CIA) where they had a hacker kid on and remember seeing him use an atari 600xl. automan was a good computer rlated programme too as he was computer generated with a sidekick cursor and his car did 90 degree turns causing his human sidekick to be mashed against the passenger window. kitt was awesome in knight rider…..80s were good for computer craze for sure