Some past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41742210

Been thinking of doing something similar, I have an Apple ImageWriter and Atari 1025 sitting in my basement. Does anyone know how long dot matrix ink ribbons last new?

Do you mean last as in how long until they dry out or last in how much you can print?

It's usually linear inches of text - which depends on how much you're printing.

Yeah print… reading anything from a few months to a year. Not bad for how cheap the ribbons are.

If they're anything like typewriter ribbons of the era (and why wouldn't they be?), a really long time if you re-ink them periodically. I don't think any of my dad's fabric ribbons ever actually broke, and he typed a lot.

EDIT: Not "professional secretary" levels, but a lot. Enough that he bought a Selectric II for use at home.

When you think “this is terrible, maybe I need a new printer” it is time to change the ribbon…ink ribbons don’t die all at once, their print just keeps getting lighter.

And yes, people bought new printers instead of replacing the ribbon because the print from the latest model in the store looked so much better than what they had at home.

I feel like the author cannot tell a serial and a parallel port apart?

Author here, I didn't! I've updated the article to reflect the actual port (and have since learned the difference between the two).

Thanks!

I was not as surprised as the author that a 1980s printer doesn't support Unicode. Possibly because I owned a Star SG-10 around 1985 or 86.

I wasn't born just yet, haha!

Thank you for the great article!

I found a nearly new daisy wheel printer in my storage. Something like this might be a good use of it.

Nice work. (The author is right, that printing ASMR in the video is incredible.)

Back in the early 90s I've discovered that there's not really any backchannel happening when printing to a dot matrix printer over the parallel port. And adding multiple ISA parallel port cards set to same IO address wouldn't cause any hardware issues, but just spit out the same data on all cards.

Which meant, as long as no paper was jamming, I could send data all three printers I had access to at the time could understand, and would save 1/3rd of printing time by having everything spit out in parallel.

My mother (parents bedroom adjacent to mine) did not think that'd qualify as ASMR at 2 in the morning.

If you like that printer sound, you’ll love the FLOPPOTRON 3.0

https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY?si=roYiok0-UxLVk-8t

I find it funny that it only prints the headlines from reddit, true reddiots only read the headlines and the comments.

This is good because it's the daily news. Meaning, it ends. You get informed, not addicted.

That's one reason I use dead trees. The news ends. I get informed, and I'm the customer not the continuously-scrolling feed addict.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be on top of every breaking news event. If there's something very important that you must know about, you will hear sirens or see an orange glow on the horizon.

I remember that NLQ font, I had Star's SG-10C with Commodore IEC interface as a kid

I miss bitmap fonts

I feel like this could be expanded into a printable daily newspaper project with all the sections newspapers have, customize-able; and also just a digital version for people who don't wanna print. (I've been circling around creating a project like that for myself)

I've had this in my backlog for a while now. If you ever move forward with yours, let me know!

I started printing out my calendar every morning on a dot-matrix printer as my alarm. It sure does its job, since it’s so loud and grating it wakes me up without fail. Needless to say, I don’t find it as ASMR-esque as OP, haha.

For decades, I have joked about "people printing out the internet" or having it printed out for them.

Nowadays, things like these are an obvious exercise in mental sanity, and I kinda envy this person.

Also, using a dot matrix printer is just beautifully retro. Love this project.