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Does anyone recall this old printer?

G

Green Xenon1

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Joined
Jan 15, 2010
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28
Hi:

I remember, from the summer of '90 to the spring of '91, I used to have a printer that made the sound I'm looking for. It was a parallel printer. The pins would make a very low-pitched crunchy, choppy sound when printing characters. It made me think of eating some cereal! Appetizing to say the least. Anyways, despite the low-pitched sound, the movement of the motors was rather fast.

Here are two pictures of the computer that used the aforementioned printer:

1. http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Corona-PC-1982.htm

2. http://www.thepcmuseum.net/comp_images/photo_CoronaPortable.JPG

I was a kid back then, about 6-7 years old. My dad gave me that computer to play around with.

I forgot the name of this printer. Does anyone have any idea what printer this was? I wonder if anyone has made a youtube recording of its sounds.


Thanks,

Green Xenon
 
I would think that any number of printers would be likely. The practical choice would have been a 9 pin impact printer. Does the name Epson ring a bell? They were very popular and set the standard in many ways. Here is a description of the FX80 which is a real classic from the period.
 
Green Xenon1 said:
What detemines the frequency of the sound generated by the pins?
Click to expand...

Speed of printing, but I would think that the higher partials are mostly a result of the paper and platten characteristics. All the pin printers that I have (lots) and have had (lots) all are about the same frequency. However, there are other noises than from the pins. The stepper motor will have different sound characteristics and make a low pitched sound as it moves the head from side to side. The sound of the pins striking is the loudest and most noticeable and is a sharp sound full of high partials. That is the sound that drove everyone crazy in offices and got the printer banned to a box or it's own room in some cases. Anyway, since you are talking about a low sound, I would think you are referring to the motors and not the pins.

Also, perhaps it's obvious but I just had to mention it since you didn't respond clearly to Jorg's post; daisy wheels don't have pins. :)
 
Well, of course you also have the dark sound of an approaching thunderstorm of a line printer getting ready to spit our paper, but I'd consider it unlikely the poster had one of those at home..
 
Band printers, such as the Teletype 40, always had a "crunchy" sound, but I doubt that one of those was used with the aforementioned system, as they were on the largish (although still technically "tabletop"). The same observation holds for drum printers. Train printers, like high-speed dot matrix were more likely a shriek and unlikely to belong to a PC user.

But I agree with the previous posters that it was likely a daisywheel/thimble unless it was a very slow dot matrix.
 
Ole Juul said:
Speed of printing, but I would think that the higher partials are mostly a result of the paper and platten characteristics. All the pin printers that I have (lots) and have had (lots) all are about the same frequency. However, there are other noises than from the pins. The stepper motor will have different sound characteristics and make a low pitched sound as it moves the head from side to side. The sound of the pins striking is the loudest and most noticeable and is a sharp sound full of high partials. That is the sound that drove everyone crazy in offices and got the printer banned to a box or it's own room in some cases. Anyway, since you are talking about a low sound, I would think you are referring to the motors and not the pins.

Also, perhaps it's obvious but I just had to mention it since you didn't respond clearly to Jorg's post; daisy wheels don't have pins. :)
Click to expand...


No. I'm confident the sound I am describing is from the pins, not the motor. This is because that sound [as low-pitched as a it was] had a "digital" characteristic. It definitely was not the motor. It resembled bunch of low-frequency sawtooth waves being encoded in a low-resolution audio file [8-bits or less of dynamic range] -- hence the "crunchy" and "choppy" qualities.
 
Radio Shack had a model of printer that had a spinning sawtooth drum and simple hammers that would hit the drum at certain parts of its rotation to create the characters. It had an ODD sound.
 
Green Xenon1 said:
What is the name of this printer?
Click to expand...

At first thought, I came up with a "Daisy Wheel" printer. I remember seeing it on an episode of Mr. Wizard's World waaaay back in the day.

Here's the wikipedia entry.

Also a Google Image Search for "daisy wheel printer" turns up a bunch of images, so something might look familiar there.

Otherwise, the wikipedia entry for "computer printer" might yield other possibilities.
 
I used to sell Diablo 630 printers, we had a few in stock one year and a local politician hired us to print around 5000 letters, it was loud in there for a week or two.
These were heavy beasts and I'm glad they went the way of the dodo

Later,
dabone
 
(Disclaimer: I used to work for George Comstock and with many of the ex-Diablo mafia)

Everything that Diablo made was heavy and made for commercial application. I passed up a chance to buy a couple of extra-wide-carriage dual-head printers from a surplus place some years ago. I'm not sorry that I did because I don't know what I'd do with one, but the scale of the things was amazing.

Even the Diablo dot-matrix (I don't recall the model--1500?) was heavy, very noisy and would probably cause severe injury if you stuck your hand in the wrong place while it was running.

The engineering on Diablo products was for the ages. They really don't build 'em like that anymore. In comparison, the Qume and NEC products are downright flimsy.
 
I've had an Epson MX80 dot matrix for 30yrs, so I've had plenty of time to think about that noise. There are two main components.

1. The characters are formed from a "dot matrix" (usually 7x9) so that, when printing, the pins strike the paper in a vertical column of 0-9 pins (depending on the specific character or space) at a frequency of approximately 10 x (rated characters per second) allowing for gaps between characters. Each character therefore makes a slightly different sound. You can clearly hear the difference between a line of underscores (one row, all columns per char) and a line of "|" (one column per char, all rows).

If the printer is old enough and CPS low enough, you hear the "chirping" effect of each character's set of strikes separated by a space.

With a daisy wheel or golf ball printer, it is always one strike per character, as with the ancient electromechanical TTY or Telex.

With a line-printer, it is one whole-line strike for each row of the character matrix - eg 10 mass strikes per line.

Then the accoustic reverberation qualities of the paper and the platen add overtones to the primary strike frequency, as Chuck mentioned earlier.

2. For all character-printers, the step motor that moves the carriage whines at a frequency determined by the step-rate used in the design. I think the Epson MX-80 step motor whines at about 180Hz left to right and about 120Hz right to left, producing that "hee-haw" song that I know so well. I haven't bothered to check the frequencies with a scope, but it is embedded in my brain.
 
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