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Was there a daisywheel printer made by IBM?

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lyonadmiral

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I'm just wondering of there was a daisy wheel printer made by IBM anytime during the silver plate era (PC, XT, AT, PPC)?

I'm going to start digging myself, but if anyone here knows.

Thanks,
Dan
 
I believe there was somethign that was mentioned one one of those PS/2 starter diskettes about different types of printers IBM offered if that is old enough.
 
lyonadmiral said:
I'm just wondering of there was a daisy wheel printer made by IBM anytime during the silver plate era (PC, XT, AT, PPC)?

I'm going to start digging myself, but if anyone here knows.
Click to expand...

Named the ¨Quietwriter¨, unless I am confusing it with the typewriter that had the same frame...
 
I don't know about dedicated printers, but IBM sold an attachment for their Wheelwriter series of daisywheel typewriters, which could turn one into a PC printer via a standard parallel port interface. These typewriters were extremely well built and many are still in use today.

a20791f127f439fe78162e_m.jpg
 
Yes, IBM made daisywheel printers. I have one here in storage(easy to get to if I have to). It looks VERY similar to the typewriter above, but without the keyboard. It had a couple of different attachments. I've got a sheet-feeder attachment, as well as the original pin-feed attachment. I got mine for free from a gent who was in the area from Canada. I believe it is an IBM PROprinter. Something along those lines.

--Jack
 
The IBM Proprinter was a dot-matrix printer. Here's a nice IBM video ad for it from 1985. Note the presence of the 5170.

There was a real push in the 80's to get dot-matrix quality up to NLQ. Sanders made multi-pass printers with downloadable fonts that could mask a lot of the "graininess" of a dot-matrix font. The Japanese, having a need to print Kanji, with its fine detail, pioneered 22-wire printheads.

Daisywheels aren't bad if you're doing insurance forms or office correspondence, but when you need to change fonts, they're a pain.

In my experience, it's almost impossible to give away a vintage daisywheel printer, regardless of condition today.

Addendum After thinking a bit, I realized that the IBM Displaywriter used either a selectric-type (5215) or a daisywheel (5218 ) printer. These were circa 1980, so they preceded the 5150 by a couple of years. You could also see these things set up with IBM mainframes as printers for logging (i.e. low speed) and such.

I don't think the 5218 was ever marketed for the PC crowd--it wasn't a "dumb" printer by any means. The DW was an EBCDIC machine and the printer codes were quite a bit more involved than the usual MX-80 stuff.
 
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Hm.. whenever I'm not interested I usually can find things in IBM parts catalogs online. One would think they might have it in one of those archived somewhere. Funny though, I certainly would think IBM made one but I'm not finding more than Chuck's similar comment on Qume maybe making a model for IBM
 
Thanks for finding that cite in Wikipedia. I thought I remembered correctly. It would have been a cold day in Hades before they'd OEM from Xerox/Diablo (IBM had been slugging it out with Xerox over the copier market since the early 70s)

You have to understand that IBM wasn't sold on the longevity of the PC platform for quite some time after its introduction, so peripherals were almost always OEMed initially (Dot matrix printers from Epson, disk drives from a variety of vendors, etc.). I remember seeing a big exhibit from IBM at NCC showing the then-new ink-jet printing (the IBM system, I believe, was electrostatic). I asked one of the marketing types there if they had any plans to introduce the technology to the PC platform. He looked at me as if I'd been smoking something funny...
 
I made it out to where I keep some this-and-that computer stuff. I can confirm that IBM DID make a daisywheel printer, the QuietWriter is what it was marketed as. Just like the typewriter, but no keyboard.

--Jack
 
There were at least three IBM daisywheels:
  • 5216 Wheelprinter
  • 5223 Wheelprinter E
  • 6902 Wheelwriter (part of the IBM 6901 Personal Typing System)
The 6902 looks incredibly like my Wheelwriter 10 Series II typewriter, minus the keyboard.
 
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