Whats that stuff...

[dennis]

clp300 for the same they charge for the compatibles. Maybe cheaper when Staples have a 15% off for two or more carts.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "The Medway Handyman" saying something like:

Nobody owns it.

[George]

True,but theres a prat going by the initials GC making himself known.

Did I say I owned it?

[meow2222]

Whatever you use has to be rotproof, so natural fibre felt and paper are out. Microfibre cloth maybe.

Re low cost lasers, they're surely the way to go if you can do without colour. I'd have to be mad to go back to an inkjet, what a PITA technology they were. Reminds me... I still remember being seriously impressed when seeing a daisy wheel that double printed to give bold! Anyone remember 7 pin dot matrixes with no descenders?

NT

[Calvin]

ote:

I long for a 7-pin dot matrix! Seriously, I have a real world application which I can't satisfy with any printer technolgy I can find at the moment. In competition diving (springboard and highboard not sub-aqua) we use an electronic score recording system in which the judges enter their scores on wireless units and they are collated on a central PC. Obviously the central PC becomes a critical failure node in that if anything were to happen to it during the event the scores might be lost. We do things to mitigate against that and ultimately someone ends up copying the raw awards from the screen onto a piece of paper. Back in the days of line printers we could simply have spat a line to the printer each time a diver dived and we'd have had a safe paper copy. Now we have inkjet and laserjet page printers I've not been able to find a windows based line driver at all. So there's something to be said for old technolgy if it happens to meet the requirement!

[Rod]

You made me think about a label printer like this:

Looks like it would do what you need - or close.

[dennis]

not print to a file using a line printer driver in windows. Put the file on a usb stick or two.

[Calvin]

Many thanks for that idea, I use one of those at work but it had never occured to me to use one in that way, it's something I'll certainly explore.

[Calvin]

That's exactly what we do with the slight tweak that if we have enough computers around we run the ticker-tape application on a seperate machine. The recording machine spits the scores out as a UDP packet and all machines on the network can listen and record as they wish. That gives quite a lot of redundancy especially as laptops don't die if the power disappears. I always save the backup file to USB stick immediately the competition is over but the real danger time is during the competition itself when you really can't save the file off. The rules of the sport, which pre-date the use of computers, demand that the awards are recorded on paper contemporaneously and there's something about having a real paper copy which makes you feel so much better than if you're told not to worry the computer will keep a record!

[Dave Liquorice]

Does it have to 7 pin? 9 pin are still available but cheap they are not compared to inkjets. A quick google in the UK on dot matrix 9 pin produced:

shows a range of what is available.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "George" saying something like:

You implied it, idiot.

[Tony Bryer]

Before leaving the UK I sold our trusty Epson LQ570 24-pin on eBay for a whole £2. We had it for printing continuous labels.

[George]

You left this out...

True,but theres a prat going by the initials GC making himself known.

[Don]

I acquired a Panasonic KX-P1131 24 pin multimode printer when my local GP moved to a "Health Centre" (spit). An excellent piece of kit using either tractor paper or single sheets. The print cartridge costs a tenner & lasts for years (literally) and are supposed to print something in the region of 6 million characters.

I would have thought there would be loads of 'em floating about given that they were standard printers used by the NHS.

Don.

[Dave Liquorice]

I tried to eBay an LQ1050 24pin not long ago, then freecycle, no takers =

ended up at the dump. B-(

[meow2222]

Any 9 pin dot matrix will work with the same commands fed to a 7 pin. The only difference is the internally stored font. Might require setting the DIP switches correctly, but theyre simple enough that even with no manual you can quickly figure it out.

Could you send your data line by line to another hand coded app (eg in basic or C) which does nothing but get the line of data and spit it out to the parallel port, adding a return & linefeed character at the end. It would be elementary to write that in Basic. IOW bypass any windows printer driver entirely.

DM ribbon carts can be modded to reink themselves over and over again. Felt pad where the ribbon's pulled past, hole in top of cart over pad, and 50/50 paraffin plus ink, eg endorsing or printer's ink. A roll of paper would probably be easier to get than fanfold.

9 pin machines are much more robust than 24 pinners, if the historic letter quality is ok.

The hammering of a DM churning its way through a big job is one thing I dont miss.

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

Hammering from a Dot Matrix? The ones I had where more of a whine or buzz. Now a Daisy Wheel or Golf Ball on the other hand... B-)

[Edgar]

Line printer?

Edgar

[dennis]

I used a line printer that printed a entire horizontal line of dots and then advanced the paper one row of dots and printed the next horizontal line. It did the entire width of the paper in one go. It was noisy but very quick.

It replaced a band printer that was slower and even more noisy but it produced typewriter quality prints.