[printer noise]
[music]
Greetings! And welcome to another exciting episode of Veronica Explains!
I'm Veronica, and today we're going to talk about something only marginally Linux related:
the dot matrix printer.
The dot matrix was a popular printer in businesses and home offices throughout the 1980s.
When 8-bit and 16-bit computer owners needed a printer, they'd often be picking up one
of these.
It's super neat!
The print head has a literal matrix of small hammers and it's actually punching the paper
through an ink covered ribbon in order to get ink on the page.
That's why they're so loud, it's literal violence printing on your paper!
I don't know if you can tell from my nerdy live stream banners, my most recent intro
video, or my occasional tweets on the subject, but I am a huge fan of the dot matrix printer!
I'll demonstrate how these things work.
Let's pretend this paper is paper and this permanent marker is a single pin, or dot,
in the dot matrix.
Now, this doesn't look like much, but if we repeat this with several pins hitting different
areas of the page, you can start to see a letter kind of emerging.
And "kind of" is the right term.
We're spoiled here in the roaring 2k20s, what with our literal lasers or heat rays making
printouts all the time.
Back in ancient times, this was about as good as you could hope for, without resorting to
pre-formed characters in the form of a daisy wheel or other typewriter style printer.
These things were loud, dusty, messy things, that could jam up easily, and offered little
in the way of customization.
I mean, just look at how I have to change the settings here!
In this model, an OKI Microline 420, I literally have to print through the menu in order to
change any of the settings.
If you want me to do another video where I discuss how to configure this very common
model of dot matrix printer, please let me know in the comments.
So surely these dusty old things are relics of the past right?
Not quite.
Sure, we don't see them sold for home computers anymore, but that doesn't mean these things
don't still have some value.
In fact, these printers fetch a good amount on the auction sites, and for good reason.
One area where I see printers like this, is industrial equipment.
There's still a fair amount of big heavy machines out there that can spit out diagnostic information
through parallel or serial.
If you compare the cost of replacing a half-ton piece of equipment against a thousand dollar
printer, it's easy to imagine why these printers are still around.
In fact, you can still hook one of these up to a more modern piece of hardware if you
really wanted to.
I rigged up one of these printers to output my driver messages when the server starts up.
[printer noise]
[paper flinging noise]
Now, I know what you might be thinking.
"Veronica, why not just route the output to a text file?"
That's fair.
But consider the cost for a small machine shop: hiring a dev or sysadmin to configure
and support that... and then consider that a new printer only costs like five hundred
to a thousand dollars.
Beyond older equipment logging, there's another reason these printers are awesome.
Printing in duplicate, triplicate, or even greater quantities.
Now, I know what you're thinking: Veronica, we can just print multiple copies.
I don't mean to be all "well actually" on you, but...
Here's the deal: printing in quadruplicate isn't the same thing as printing four copies.
Allow me to demonstrate: here I have a carbon-less copy template for a US government tax form,
form 1099.
I bought this template from a local office supply store and as you can see it has four
independent sheets.
The top one says "copy a" and is for the IRS.
The middle one, for some reason, says copy one, and it goes to the state.
The third one says copy b, and it goes to the recipient.
The last one says copy c, and it's going to the taxpayer.
In addition to the differences in the front layer, the back contains helpful information
for the recipient of each section.
In short, this is four separate documents, and not a single document that's just printed
four times.
An impact printer, such as a dot matrix printer, can fire off all four documents at the exact
same time, and for many organizations, this can scale up to a significant cost and time
savings over more modern laser printers.
Now let's print this data onto all four documents at the exact same time.
[printer noise]
Pretty neat, huh?
Now, imagine if I had to print a few thousand of them.
Think of the cost savings of doing it this way over buying an expensive multi-feed laser
printer.
In contrast, carbon-less templates like this one often come pre-assembled with good perforations
ready for your business, and ordering custom templates is something many local print shops
can easily handle.
I see these printers used frequently for carbon-less printing and for more than just tax documents:
a printer like this one can print checks, invoices, internal control documents, job
estimates, or receipts, and can make sure the right information is getting on the right
page every single time.
Now sure, perhaps in a lot of those cases we've moved on into email, sms, or other digital
forms of communication.
But remember: just because you've accepted new technology doesn't mean everyone else has!
Believe me, I see plenty of folks still actively surfing the web on Windows Vista.
There are still plenty of individuals who want the paper receipt or the mailed invoice
or the physical check, and that's okay!
And let's not forget about the longevity of these things.
I mean this printer right here, an OKI Microline 420, was just retired last week after printing
batch reports from a COBOL system every single day for a decade.
How long do you expect your desk printer to last?
Now, getting one of these to print in the modern era can be a bit of a chore.
Many of the models, including the OKI models that I've mentioned here in this video, have
USB connections, so they're pretty easy to get connected to a modern machine.
But if your model only has one of these kinds of ports such as a Centronics port, or a parallel
port, you might think you're entirely out of luck.
But don't sweat it.
You can connect to this just like any other network printer if you have one of these!
This is the JetDirect 500x.
It's a network bridge for older printers and it's a great way to connect an older parallel
or Centronics printer up to the network.
I picked this one up on eBay recently for like eighty dollars American.
The way it works is pretty straightforward: this is a multi-way printer switch and each
parallel output gets a different port number.
After hooking it up, you'll want to load paper before you turn these things on.
They often don't have safeties to prevent you from printing right onto the roller, and
that can be pretty bad for the printer.
Now I'm not going to go into exactly how to feed the paper through.
There's a ton of different models out there and it's going to vary from device to device.
But I did want to show you how most of these use continuous feed paper.
The printer has a little grippy bit which grabs this paper and feeds it through.
Next you typically have to feed the paper through to the print head.
This can be finicky.
This model has a wheel I can use to manually align the paper where I want it.
Quick side note: as the sweater says, I am not a printer repair person.
I am just an enthusiast, but hit me up in the comments if you want to see another video
covering more technical details about these particular printers.
Now that the paper is fed through, let's power it on and then add it in Linux.
For this demo, I'm using Fedora 35.
[music]
Now, I like to go through the CUPS web interface to add printers like this.
I basically go to localhost:631, and then go to the "administration" tab.
From here, I select "add printer" and follow the prompts.
Since I'll be printing from the terminal, I'm going to pick a simple name for the printer:
Microline 421.
Note that for the driver, I usually pick "generic text only printer".
That's because these things are much better at printing raw text directly from the terminal.
Alternatively, you can select the model and pick the non-generic driver, especially if
you want to print large banners from LibreOffice.
Let me know if you want to see another video where I show you how to do that.
I will say that when you use the "generic text only driver", you can print ascii art
right from the terminal, and that is a fantastic use of your time.
I'm ready to get printing!
To print a text file right from the terminal, you can use the command "lp".
In this case, I'm going to print this script with "lp" and then the file name.
Then the "d" flag, then the name of that printer.
And boom!
We have a printout!
I think we tend to look at older technology like the dot matrix printer and forget that
it's still useful.
As I've mentioned in other videos, one of the things I love about Linux is that it's
often trivial to connect to older hardware, like this printer.
Linux helps give supposedly dead hardware new life, and that's not surprising at all.
Because Linux is awesome, and so are you!
[music]
[offscreen voice] "Want me to do another one?"
"No it's, fine..." [laughing]
"This is a multi-way 'prinner' switch and each..."
I need to say "printer", I said "prinner".
I've been doing that a lot, I'm sure. [offscreen voice] "prinner!"
"Prinner" sounds like somebody's last name.
"My name is Julie Prinner"...
you're not laughing at me?
[off camera voice] "I'm Julie Prinner and I'm offended"
[laughing]
[music]