As is usual for this time of year I’ve come to my parents place for a visit. Some of our old computer hardware is still in storage here, some of which I’ve already documented. Today we’re going to take a quick look at our old printer, an Epson EX 1000.
We got this particular example with our first computer early in 1990, at the time I remember there being many dot matrix printers in service, but technologies such as inkjet and laser were emerging as better alternatives.
It was quite noisy when printing, and shook the computer desk which it sat on. We had the tractor feed option which allowed the use of continuous paper, which was handy when printing a large amount of text such as program code. It could print graphics, which we occasionally used, but with only the black and white ribbon the images weren’t of a high quality. I remember having a colour ribbon for ours, but never actually using it.
Looking inside we can see the print head, and the wire that is used to move it back and forth. Many other printers used rubber belts that would eventually perish, this arrangement lasts significantly longer and would continue to work even now. Although looking at the guide rails they would need polishing and lubricating before it could be used.
The printer has a small control panel to set the font and print quality manually. This could be controlled by software, I remember MS works would change these settings and allow for different fonts in the same document.
There is this curious slot with a connector which isn’t described in the manual. I assume it’s for additional buffer memory or perhaps for adding other type faces. There is an internal slot for connecting other types of interfaces such as IEEE-488, but on our printer this isn’t populated as we just used the standard parallel interface.
The tractor feed mechanism can be seen here, with some teeth that engaged with holes in the paper. Setting this up initially was a bit tricky, but saved constantly feeding in paper manually and gave you a wider printing area. You could feed in standard A4 sheets as well.
Dot matrix printers such as this one have many draw backs, such as being noisy and having lower quality print. However they stuck around partly because they were generally quite reliable and were very cheap on consumables. I remember a printer much like this one at my fathers old workplace hidden away under a sound proof hood continuously printing almost every day. This printer remained in service until we upgraded to a new PC and printer some seven years later.
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