IBM Wheelwriter Printer - An Awesome Disappointment

[@TechTangents]

If you want to see how this printer compares to other printers of the era, check out this video on my 2nd channel: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qWW2YmSoe8-fibM As a printer it is slow, not just slow compared to modern printers, but slow for its time. Yes it is a daisy wheel that has sharper text than a dot matrix, but it is still very slow. I'm not sure if it is inordinately slow for a daisy wheel printer so I will be keeping an eye out for some to compare it against in the future. But based on my experience with it, I suspect that even for a daisy wheel it is slow.

[@Alcochaser]

The Colleco Adam printer was a wheel writer type mech. And ohh my goodness, was it SLOW, the IBM here runs circles around it. Plus the Adam's wheelwriter was LOUD. One advantage, when you did a resume on it, the person thought you took the time to type it up back then. I never had the heart to clue them in, LOL.

[@St0rmcrash]

The one thing I can think of that would justify this back in the day is Letter Quality Printing. Dot matrix printers, even on a letter quality setting look inferior to a typed page and are obvious they came from a computer. I bet the appearance of being typed rather than printed meant a lot more to businesses and clients back then than we realize now. If a business already needed a typewriter for typing correspondence this option lets it do double duty and automatically print letter quality documents from a computer without a secretary needing to transcribe a dot matrix print for mailing or needing a second daisy wheel printer. A faster dot matrix printer could have been used for casual prints or proof printing drafts of letters before using the typewriter to print up the final document at full letter quality

[@KipRoof]

I was thinking the same. Many schools and businesses wouldn't have accepted dot matrix output. But letter quality from an actual typewriter would be fine. My high school teachers would absolutely not accept dot-matrix prints for assignments.

[@Beany2007FTW]

I suppose the two sides to this are: There were better options for letter quality printing even back in the day, but... No one ever got fired for buying IBM. And that latter one world have been the kicker in the 80s corporate world.

[@Beany2007FTW]

I mean, hell, it still is a point even today. Every tried getting AMD hardware past an account manger with ideas above their station who doesn't understand that Zen3 is better than anything Intel is doing say the moment? Everything changes, and everything stays the same....

[@brianellison8744]

Auto-filling carbon-copy type multiple sheet forms is another potential use back in the day, especially in office environments.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Yeah, like those typed-up “thank you for buying our product!” letter you’d get with all sorts of things for a long time. Gotta churn out a bunch but they have to look crisp and legible

[@freednighthawk]

It may be slower than frozen molasses, but the character quality is insane. I'd say it beats out most modern inkjets and possibly lower end laser printers.

[@User0000000000000004]

No, it doesn't.

[@Colz_]

​@@User0000000000000004 yeah sadly it is not better but it is way cooler

[@vwestlife]

I'm disappointed that you used a printer with a UNIX-based operating system, but didn't take the opportunity to generate the "lp0 on fire" error message.

[@gern0tk]

But Brian Kernighan would be proud of your shell one liner. Although you could have used „awk“. 😋

[@KiraSlith]

@@nneeerrrd The Linux kernel is a FOSSy derivative of UNIX, it's name is after all a portmanteau of "Linus" (after it's creator Linus Torvalds) and "UNIX", and at one point Linux DID have "lp0 on fire" as an error message for unresponsive parallel port printers. I'm not sure it's still there though, since Kernel 5 is going through quite a spring cleaning.

[@amandawashington4239]

@@KiraSlith *TORVALDS* is a name/word I prob woulda got spanked for saying. Glad they went with Linux!

[@T3hBeowulf]

Having used one of those back in it's natural habitat and timeframe, it really felt that slow then too. What made it stand out against the dot matrix was letter quality. The letters it produced were sharp and clear vs. the dot matrix printer.

[@User0000000000000004]

Letter quality? HP laser printers. That's what we did back then.

[@avro683lancaster7]

"Using a typewriter as a printer" Time to get some solenoids then

[@FirstWizardZorander]

I like that it's slow. Gives us more time to enjoy that wonderful sound!

[@dereketnyre7156]

Wheel writer was great for printing resumes back in the day. They printed slow but looked really nice….

[@thrillscience]

It may be slow, but for the first users of this it was great. Businesses could send letter-perfect business letters out without typing them one at a time.

[@garthhowe297]

It's a shame it didn't print bi-directionally. As someone who learned typing, on typewriters, the ability to produce perfect documents, would have outweighed the slow performance. You were used to everything about your computer being slow.

[@PixelSchnitzel]

I talked my boss into buying a Wheelwriter with the Centronics printer kit in 1985 (or was it '86?). My memory may be flawed, but I want to say it was a little over $3,000 (that's >$7,500 today if I'm right). I wrote a database engine and app on an IBM PC (no stinkin' hard drive!) to generate custom product order forms for the sales staff. The Wheelwriter printed on mimeograph stencils so forms could be printed in batches of a couple hundred at a time. Oh the smell and the sounds! :-) That app saved an ENORMOUS amount of labor, waste & errors, so the Wheelwriter paid for itself pretty quickly. Funny that today, I wish I still had that machine. So instead, I'm in the process of turning a Selectric II into a Teletype terminal. Don't even get me started on the ASR-33 that was offered to me free after I wrote software that replaced it. I turned it down. AAAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!

[@St0rmcrash]

That's a use case I hadn't though of before for this, cutting stencils. We're so used to easy printing at work from machines that can do small bulk or cheaply order large form prints that we wouldn't think about how an automatic typewriter to cut a stencil for duplication would be useful

[@kaitlyn__L]

Hell yeah Selectric TTY!! You rock!

[@JacGoudsmit]

I remember the time that this printer/typewriter and your PS/2 model 70 came out, and this was definitely the time when IBM could get away with serious flaws such as no bidirectional printing, for the reason that they were IBM and people (or actually companies) would buy IBM anyway. Some of the PS/2 models that came out around that time also got bad reviews because clone models ran circles around them when it came to speed, features and value for money. This was also the time when they went "We are IBM, and MCA is the new PC bus and you shall all follow us and give us your money" and everyone went "Nope". But you have to admit, as slow and clunky and annoying as it is, it was super comfortable to type on, and the output quality was top notch. I can read my name even on my phone screen :)

[@leoangeles-murillo5643]

When an office upgraded years ago, they were kind enough to gift me Wheelwriters in 1992 under the Lexmark name. I acquired a 1500 and 3500 which was the most advanced Wheelwriter at that time. I also hit the jackpot when I found an ebay listing for 10 Typestyle Fonts, One being OLD ENLGLISH. I was hoping a machine would have the printer option and to this day I continue to look for one. I use the 3500 to this day for nostalgic reasons and because the print simply cant be matched even by my high end laser printer. And above all the sound. I will keep using my Wheelwriters as long as there are Typewriter repair technicians here in Los Angeles.

[@ropersonline]

I bet office secretaries at the time were pretty happy with this thing, because they could likely out-type it, and that allowed them to slow down.

[@KrisRyanStallard]

I love that you were trying to get your hands on some random type writer for years. I would have never known about this interesting bit of tech otherwise.

[@joeturner7959]

They were competing in mid range with the Diablo LQP, not the Epson and IBM low end dot matrix, which would take ( even longer ) to print a page, or the LaserJet which would run more than $2000. These could be had for a bit of a premium @ $900, but you would also have a typewriter. I could imagine this pared with a PC running Display Write for composition.

[@markleuck]

It wasn't "poorly conceived". standard typing was the norm of the day back then, graphics weren't universal and most copy was just text. There were a lot of similar printers then for just that reason

[@ryballs4569]

I think he meant about being unable to do reverse typing instead of carriage return

[@macshune]

@@ryballs4569 - yeah, kind of a bummer it can't do bidirectional printing like the smith-corona with the messenger module. i've got that set and it's pretty great for needing to seem serious when sending a letter lol

[@jamesdye4603]

As someone else pointed out it wasn't the speed that was a concern, it was print quality. I worked for a computer company back in 85-86 and daisy wheel typewriters/printers were common. Also, expectations weren't high because that was all that was around back then.

[@mcw1593]

I’ve had one of these typewriters for about 20 years. It was obsolete when I got it, and it’s a rare gem today.

[@aswarmofdeadinsects]

lpr(1) could help with some of the line wrapping and carriage returning troubles.

[@SenileOtaku]

7:12 Actually, at my first IT job, when the only two printers we had were set up for doing invoices (one printer with multi-page forms) and the other (a dot-matrix) was for doing pick-tickets, I *really* wanted that printer interface so we could start doing word-processing for business letters. One tiome they did a "mass mailing" where we used the pre-programming function in the Wheelwriter to print up letters, with a pause programmed in for the secretary to type in the recipient's name/address. Yeah, I had the fun of setting THAT one up. So yes, I definitely would have wanted that option back then.

[@boelwerkr]

Does that typewriter know half, quarter steps and backsteps? Long ago i had some awesome ascii files with special step commands that would create "typewiter Images". The best was a landscape and a train. I think i found a collection of such files a while ago on some achive server ...

[@meeder78]

We had two of them at home at some point (leftovers from an office). The print quality is ofcourse very good. It also had a high quality setting in which it struck every letter twice! I did print out numerous school reports on the thing which made a huge amount of noise throughout the house 😂

[@GeoffSeeley]

The sound of this thing printing coupled with the sound of the model M keys makes me want one just for the sound alone!

[@joeturner7959]

Yes, the other thing was the keyboards were superb.

[@jp-ny2pd]

Characters per line is the little red indicator behind the view window above the keys. So how many characters per line was kind of staring at you. Looks like this typewriter supports 10, 12, and 15 characters per inch. But it's good to test it anyways :)

[@frestkd]

My family had an Olivetti version of the typewriter/printer...

[@qubex]

My orthodontist had one of these way back in the first half of the nineties. I remember spying it in his office and being both baffled and intrigued for the past almost-thirty years.

[@redthorne2836]

I remember my NEC Pinwriter I had for my Amiga...the sounds in this video bring be back.

[@ropersonline]

The NEC Pinwriter was faster and more versatile. You could maybe argue that for the installed typewriter font, the Wheelwriter still produced better-quality lettering, but that's about it. Second thought, the Wheelwriter was also wider than most Pinwriter models, so IBM's product was better suited as a Unix line printer.

[@WILFRED1184]

I used to work on these a while back. Wish I would have save a copy of the manuals. BTW if you run into an issue with irregular ink density. Check you striker solenoid. It has a rubber bumper on the end that is notorious for breaking due to age.

[@KiraSlith]

I like the idea of using one of these for hardcopy error logging in high-stress or high-security environments, since it only accepts ASCII inputs anyway, with a mono directional feed motor. Not even a super genius hacker can wipe that log without getting inside and ripping it off the printer.

[@kaitlyn__L]

In “The Cuckoo’s Nest” that’s exactly what they do to intercept the East German hacker who was erasing his traces. Route all his terminal connections through the printer with a big box of paper on it - no outward indication it’s even happening with LAN speed vs slow modems

[@KiraSlith]

@@kaitlyn__L Just looked it up, "The Cuckoo's Egg" is the title actually. Fascinating book, I doubt anyone else back then would've thought to use a telex machine as a dialup terminal tap. A man far ahead of his time.

[@thejackofclubs]

14:00 youre counting how many characters while the printer says 84 characters at 12 point

[@ropersonline]

It took me a while to figure out your "the printer says" was in reference to the ruler right on the printer, fully visible at the beginning of the video. See my other comment. EDIT: It's not 12 point, it's 12 CPI. Bigger numbers indicate smaller characters. EDIT2: Or actually, in this case, Tech Tangent's wheel is 10P (pitch), i.e. 10 CPI. Pitch and CPI are more or less inversely correlated to points, but actually, according to psu dot edu's Understanding Fonts page, pitch is only used with monospace fonts while points are used with proportional ones. What you read off the ruler is that at 12P (=pitch/CPI), you can print up to 84 characters within 7 inches. Tech Tangents uses a 10P wheel though, so within his 8½" US letter width, he could print at most 85 characters, paper edge to paper edge. I'm not sure why it also says 012 on the actual ribbon cartridge. Maybe that's an approximate points equivalent? Or some sort of manufacturer's code? Does anyone know?

[@RetroTechChris]

It's good to trust but verify I presume :-) The printer also claimed 16 CPS!

[@megan_alnico]

WHAT!? No ASCII art? Wasted opertunity lol.

[@WaynoGur]

I had one of the Smith Corona wheel writers. They were slow, but the print quality was superb.

[@RetroTechChris]

As the old saying goes "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Maybe there should have been an exception for this, ha! But, ya, your title captures it well! Trying to think of the advantage of doing this back in the day: 1) cheaper to install the conversion kit on an existing typewriter than buying a printer? 2) Wanting daisy wheel quality over dot matrix quality? Anyway, great video, and I am glad you showcased it! I always like to see the obscure, and this definitely qualifies!

[@sokoloft3]

Thing sounds like a machine gun almost at the end lol. A neofetch would of been awesome to see on it but oh well. Awesome vid as always!

[@ropersonline]

The machine gun comparison is almost apt, considering how many people IBM helped kill. Not always with literal machine guns, but still.

[@0_1_2]

The Thompson sub machine gun was nicknamed the Chicago typewriter.

[@wacholder5690]

I recall having seen a combo of Wheelwriter III and IBM PS/2 30 in a bank running PC-DOS and IBM Text 4 in around 1988. They were processing letters to customers with it initially - but due to the limitations they switched to the IBM 5202 Quietwriter II which also used a -sort of- carbon ribbon and produced way better looking output than the obnoxious needle printers of that time.

[@cleanycloth]

Ahh, that carriage return sound is /awesome/ 😁

[@AerinRavage]

*cries in Coleco ADAM homework printing*

[@LastofAvari]

Clearly not the best option even for the time, but it is still quite a fascinating typewriter/printer.

[@orcatype225]

At its maximum speed, assuming the daisy wheel does minimum rotation, the wheelwriter mechanism was rated at 20 cps. Some of them had bidirectional printing to speed things up a bit. At least for the IBM wheelwriter series II. It’s quite fascinating that ibm released different typewriters with different print speeds.

[@JapanPop]

The best daisy wheel font was “Madeline”. Dad printed so many documents in that font with a Tandy DWP. Would love to see a TTF version for modern machines.

[@c00kee]

In fact, "Madelaine" was a Triumph-Adler (Royal) proprietary typestyle. It was also Proportional Spacing. Thus, quite popular :-)

[@JapanPop]

@@c00kee I didn’t know that! Thanks!

[@AquaWarfare]

I clean banks from time to time, I see personal wheelwrither's still to this day!

[@Not-TheOne]

You gotta add some support to that table....I see a disaster in your future :)

[@souta95]

I had a Smith Corona daisywheel PWP about 15-20 years ago that I used to type up many highschool papers on. It had a full GUI and saved to a floppy disk. I remember also using it like a printer because I could convert the files to/from word perfect 6 format, and I happened to have Word Perfect 6 for Windows. Anyway, when printing out a full document it would print in both directions, unlike the IBM.

[@KeritechElectronics]

This may not be the old school Selectric, but still a thing of beauty :) And if I recall correctly, these can be modded to work as not just a line printer, but a fully fledged bi-directional VT-100 compatible console.

[@ropersonline]

People with small left thumbs might have found the IBM Wheelwriter slightly frustrating, due to how unnecessarily wide the Code key is, making the space bar potentially harder to reach for some.

[@nystemy]

Idly watching this while working on other stuff, suddenly hearing Protogen out of the blue at 10:20, can't help but look over and nod slowly. Didn't expect a furry being mentioned here so casually... But its a protogen, so... Could have been a synth though.

[@singletona082]

The upgrade to printer feels like a tacked on 'hey what if people with this typewriter don't want to buy a printer even though it is incredibly slow and loud?'

[@_Thrackerzod]

It's remarkably quiet compared to the dot matrix printers of the time.

[@alphaLONE]

you should maybe put a scale in those PCB pictures, would make it easier for prototyping new boards

[@TechTangents]

The chips are standard DIP parts with 0.1" spacing between the pins. So that can be used as a reference to get dimensions for everything else.

[@buckykattnj]

Oh, cool. I picked up one of these in a thrift shop last year... it has the printer option... I didn't realize that it was particularly rare. Only thing that sucks is that my daisywheel is shot... and so it the ribbon... and I haven't been inclined to get a replacement at current prices.

[@absalomdraconis]

Ribbon should be easy enough. For the daisywheel, I'd suggest checking some 3d printer sites to see if any interesting custom ones ate available.

[@mnotgninnep]

I'm so envious. I'd love to get hold of the print module to reverse engineer and recreate it. As for the print wheel, parts are available on ebay for reasonable prices. The default print wheel search for "IBM 086 12P Prestige Elite 001-008 Cartridge Printwheel II Reorder No. 1353502" If you're not so inclined, I'd like to buy the print module from you please.

[@JeffTiberend]

I remember a friend’s father who used his Olivetti typewriter as a printer with his Commodore computers when I was a kid in the mid 80’s.

[@weatherlady9666]

Giggling that I had this monster all through high school. I bought a new home computer with word processor and separate printer in 88 for college. Ah, memories.

[@MelsvanWees]

I love the sound off the IBM mechanism returning after a sentence!

[@equid0x]

I used an Atari wheel printer for many years and I'm pretty sure it was slower than this. While these printers were slow, it was better than retyping on a typewriter. You could save your docs and use spell check, thesaurus, etc. Easy to print multiple copies.

[@auteurfiddler8706]

I bought a Canon S68-s electronic wheelwriter around 1987. And I bought both the optional serial interface and the optional parallel interface. So you could use it as a printer with Apple or Ibm compatibles. It has a small lcd which buffered part of a line. It had a spell checker. So it was almost a word processor. Also a correction ribbon. I seldom used it because I used my brother's Tandy DWP-230 which did the same thing (no correction ribbon of course) and the ribbons were expensive and rare on the Typewriter. The type writer was good enough for home use but would have been a bit of light duty for an office. But it only cost a fraction of what a Selectric or Wheelwriter.

[@IBM_Museum]

I have a "Wheelwriter 50 Series II, Typewriter 6788 Operator's Guide" that even covers the display that could be attached and the optional 720Kb 4865 diskette drive. That's in addition to the Wheelwriter 3, Wheelwriter 5, and similar typewheel Actionwriter 1 systems. Neither of my Wheelwriters (both identified as the Model 5441) has a Centronics plug, although the Actionwriter 1 appears to have a DIN connection serial port. Mine have the add-on backs to hold optional circuitboards, I've got a separate 4865 drive, but not any displays. My Dad had an office supply store, renting and selling IBM and Xerox typewriters as part of the business - I tried to grab up what I could when he closed, but typewriters were passed their prime and he had reduced what he kept on-hand.

[@ianwiese1]

I deliver auto parts and there's a Ford dealership here that has one of these on their front reception desk. I don't think they use it but still neat

[@5nowChain5]

oh god, i used to have to fix them on occasion back in the late 80's. only ran into a few in London. the triple head 24pin dot matrix version was far faster, so fast you needed a separate room or acoustic hood to quieten the racket.

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi, Cool video. Many years ago back in @ 1984-86 the receptionist at the factory i worked had either this or very similar unit, there were no PC's at that place She had about 3 or 4 wheels to choose from the standard courier 10 style ( traditional fixed width typewriter) the others looked like cursive font, times new roman She probably typed up 1 or 2 letters for me a month and i did prefer times new roman or the cursive for letters, however stock and price lists was the fixed width While they are slow compared to todays printers, you need to put it back into perspective, now you could type it up on the pc, check spelling and spacing, and then save or print, it made the 2 finger male typist like me a semi-pro i wonder why IBM did not pre think the buffer and stored the data as a series of separate 80 character lines and when at the end of the line, process the next line backwards by typing from right to left giving it a workable bi-directional printing which would be some what faster ( unless your first line was say 10 characters from left and the next line the full 80 characters ) May have to find a "golf ball" printer as they were cool as well At wok these days it is hard to find continuous sheet printers new and they are expensive, in my last job i kept 2 x win XP machines that had serial and parallel as it bach controlled 2 different batch printers for EOM stockdake for the auditor ( why this auditor with his state of the art Apple watch, Apple laptop , Apple ipad insist on 132 column wide print outs and not saved to PDF i dont know - fraud ?? you can change a text to pdf , sure you can , you can do that and print it on wide paper cant you what is the point ) Regards George

[@stumpybear60]

I had an Olivetti ET231 that used the daisy wheel because I did word processing. People would pay me to type their research papers in Word Perfect and I would print their output on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. It was much easier than using a Selectric and typing the paper manually. If there were any corrections, I could just reprint the page(s) in true letter quality. Later, I bought a dot matrix ink jet printer HP DeskJet 550C to do the same thing much faster.

[@ropersonline]

With all the right adjustments made and the right paper supplied, what is the actual maximum width (column count) the IBM Wheelwriter can print? According to Wikipedia, "[m]ost drum, chain, and bar printers were capable of printing up to 132 columns, but a few designs could only print 80 columns and some other designs as many as 160 columns." Also, the IBM 1403 line printer normally did 120 columns, but had an optional 132-column add-on. EDIT: thejackofclubs's comment made me do a double-take, and then I noticed the printer's ruler showing that 110, 132 or even 165 columns were possible, depending on the installed wheel (10, 12 or 15 CPI, i.e. Characters Per Inch) and thus character size. The print width is 11 inches.

[@ropersonline]

PS: I bet with a 15 CPI wheel installed, printouts of some of the more, ahem, popular ASCII art would have looked better than usual.

[@Aeduo]

I think banks still use these. Probably for making out cashier's checks and stuff.

[@mutzbunny]

I am really exited to see the floppy drive of that Model 70 fixed. because i have the exact same model 70, with a broken floppy too

[@MySmartHomeDomain]

Nice video, this is one of the later generation typewriters. The 6746,6747 and the 6750 used an option that clipped onto the back. The 5201 was based on the 6750 which used the thermal printhead as opposed to the daisy wheel.

[@gammaxana]

I happen to have a clip in the back ww6 pc printer option. I got the two parts from eBay and haven’t seen them since show up but it’s working with windows 11

[@talideon]

The logic on that board is ridiculously barebones. No wonder it's so slow. It looks as if it's just buffering it and sending each character to the main board of the typewriter, so there's absolutely no way that it could do things like take advantage of the current head position to make printing more efficient. Mind you, given how primitive it is, you could replace 90% of the printer board with a cheapo microcontroller.

[@tonyrad8714]

Another fantastic video Shelby. Keep them up.

[@timothyt.82]

Just a quick quip: Typewriters as printers are super niche, but also super useful if you are a writer and don't always want to boot up a printer to type something. While this may not be a concern with how SSDs and NVMe makes booting to OS insanely fast, having something you could write a rough draft to (and with today's technology save to a working memory to transfer to a computer later) would be something of interest for writers all across the board. However, it is still very niche.

[@timmooney7528]

Back in high school I had a daisy wheel typewriter (Panasonic?) that had an access port for what I imagine was a centronics or serial interface. I never found any more information on it, considering it would've been much nicer to print from than my Commodore 1526. I'll have to stop by my parents and see if it hasn't been thrown out.

[@realjohnboxall]

We still used daisy-wheel printers in the early 1990s as they were cheap to run and laser printers were much more expensive to buy and run (and required better hardware to drive them). Sure you could get a 24-pin dot matrix but they weren't as good with print quality. You would set up the sheet feeder, insert the paper, hit print and go for a cup of tea - to return to a perfectly-typed report for the management. Good times.

[@ExperimentIV]

i’ve always wanted a daisy wheel printer, especially if there was some way to print raster images using them. just a silly dream i’ve always had (not to mention an IBM selectric that would work as a printer!)

[@absalomdraconis]

Baring convenient overlaps with ASCII art, graphics would have been the domain of either a specialty wheel (which likely still would have been stuck with dot-matrix style), or running the page through a second unit (either a plotter or a different style of printer- inkjet, it's worth noting, actually existed in a few models in the 80s, and dates back at least to the 1800s for intercontinental telegraph cables).

[@c00kee]

Many Daisywheel typewriters came either with a built in printer interface, or the option for one. No basic IBM Selectric ever did although there have been various kits to convert them and IBM did produce some factory "I/O Writers" but again, they were proprietary. Problem with the Selectric is they are extremely labour-intensive to maintain and you have to have one in pretty good mechanical condition to begin with.

[@kshadehyaena]

Slow or not, this thing certainly /sounds/ like an industrial business machine.

[@BCProgramming]

@7:15 you question how anybody could be happy with this printer. It is important to remember that back then, for printers, you really only had two choices as a consumer: Dot Matrix, or Daisywheel. Laserjet may have been introduced in 1984 but it was hardly affordable for home users, and Inkjet didn't exist until 1988 and even then was very expensive. Daisywheels were inexpensive, slow, but had very clear text output compared to Dot Matrix printers, and honestly Dot Matrix, when set to the highest quality, weren't terribly faster a lot of the time anyway, so the big advantage was mostly being able to print graphics. Being able to get a dual function typewriter+printer was probably cheaper than getting a typewriter and a printer so people who needed both would save money that way. And- likely it was more affordable than the competing dual printers because of it's disadvantage.

[@absalomdraconis]

The inkjet had been invented in the 1800s for the first transoceanic telegraph cables, so they probably existed as printers in the 80s, but I think the stuff I read about them specifically mentioned _industrial_ contexts for marking boxes with dates & such.

[@Honeybearsphone]

Fun fact that's the typewriter I learned touch typing on in high school

[@gern0tk]

OMG. Imagine an office room full of these typewriters. And colleagues complained about my mechanical keyboard when I code…

[@absalomdraconis]

This came near the end of the age of the secreterial pool, so this model at least would likely have dominated very few rooms, if any. More likely would be various older units, or a room with several printers, presumably printing documents brought on floppy (or sent over a network) from other rooms. Most places with these probably had them in 1s or 2s at most.

[@ropersonline]

Some googling revealed that the IBM Personal Wheelwriter came out in 1988 - surprisingly late, and after the discontinuation of the IBM PC, XT and AT, and following the introduction of the IBM PS/2. So in terms of maybe going for that Cadetwriter conversion and hooking up your Wheelwriter to your Nova 4/X or microNOVA, it would be the wrong decade and not entirely period-accurate. But taken together with your existing paradoxically older Data General glass terminal, it would still be massively cool for each NOVA to have its own hardware terminal. The inverted chronology notwithstanding, you could take both terminals to schools and allow students to compare and contrast the difference between TTYs and glass terminals. It's the difference between being limited to ed(1) or ex(1) and being able to actually run vi(1), like a full-screen snob.

[@okaro6595]

Diablo 630 from 1980 could do 30 characters per second. Daisy wheel printers were expensive so I could see the idea of using a typewriter as a printer. I bought a Brother HR-10 in 1986 when it was on sale. I recall it was 12 cps. It was only 325 € inflation adjusted. Two years earlier it had been five times as much and that was cheap for a daisy wheel. You would typically print just a few sheets so the speed was not that critical. Note that you needed to set the sheets separately and make sure they were straight - through I bought a pin feed device.

[@DKJones96]

It might be slow but that printer does sound really cool. The ball head always reminds me of that Hard Copy news intro from when I was a kid. kzbin.info/www/bejne/novRfYGOhsymm80

[@LaskyLabs]

Did somebody say *DAISY WHEEL?*

[@User0000000000000004]

Sweet jesus I LOVE that spacebar sound. Reminds me of being 10 years old and doing homework on my dad's PS/2 30.

[@rudodejong]

I had to snicker a bit about the apparent amazement regarding the 80-ish character width of a standard paper size.

[@AngeloTelesforo]

I would love to see how it would handle diacritics. I remember most of the matricial printers didn’t. You had to print like a + carriage return + ‘ to get an á. It was mostly achieved through software. I had never seen a typewriter that would function as a printer! I used to have a regular typewriter when I was a kid, computers and printers were only available on my late teens.

[@joeturner7959]

Which would necessitate the paring with the requisite computer composition software. I would bet this would work well with DisplayWrite 4.

[@code123ns]

Have you tried setting the paper size or margins on the Wheelwriter before pouring characters into it and damaging the platen? I've got one at home and I knew that this option existed, but never saw one, so this is awesome. It's been some years since I've turned it on, but I somehow remember it typing both ways when going from document memory. Might be mistaken.

[@kwacz]

Its not supposed to be fast. I dont think its sold with the expectation of printing many pages at a time.. but i do think its really cool and would watch this thing print all day.

[@iso1600]

I love your videos. It's helping with my dementia.

[@Lysander-Spooner]

Love old tech. I have a Wheelwriter 15 but it does not have the printer option installed. Mine is refurb that looks and works like new.

[@soundguydon]

Back in the day this would have been a great machine because of the letter quality. No Dot Matrix printer even came close to this. With that being said, even after laser printers became "affordable" and we had one in the office, we still kept the old typewriter(s) around for various things like envelopes, file-folder labels, etc. Things like that are much easier these days, what with forms and WYSIWYG, but even well into the 90's, typewriters were still necessary office equipment.

[@iamsargon]

Before Laser Printers, Daisy Wheel printers were a viable option if you were looking for letter perfect. The only other option at that time was Dot Matrix Printers.

[@mhmrules]

Now I just used the Wheelwriter as a Typewriter at my mom's office, and yes, I would totally out-type the Typewriter sometimes, much to my amusement. 😂

[@Bout_TreeFiddy]

@techtangents Did you figure out what the "Online" function is, in conjunction with the IBM PC Printer?

[@Beany2007FTW]

Seeing Adrian's Digital Basement as a Patron is as heartwarming to me for you as seeing Civvie11 as a patron for IcarusLives (if you know, you know) Big KZbinrs chipping in for the smaller/more niche KZbinrs is the sort of geeky love I like to see

[@H34D5H07]

It just shows how obsessed we are about speed that can already surpasses human interaction with the device.

[@jdtayloruk]

There was a similar idea 10-15 years ago. Basically they produced a large unit which had a similar design with a cover that closed over the keyboard.. In addition this had an a4 printer (under keyboard print output) (basic colour option was available). Those were a little heavy to carry, It really should have been kept-in one place and not carried around daily. In my own opinion those were not suitable for an education facility where laptops and PC’s were far better option. I forgot to mention, these did have a 1.44 mb 3,5 inch floppy drive.

[@21stcenturybohemian]

Wow.. that is a sound I have not heard since I was a kid.

[@izzieb]

IBM selling a slow and inferior product? I'm appalled and shocked. No, wait - the opposite of shocked. Especially considering modern IBM's behaviour. Wonder if this is around the time the rot set in for them

[@mnotgninnep]

This is awesome. Could you possibly read the numbers from the ROM chip under the sticker and the values from the capacitors please?

[@joeturner7959]

He said he put it up on git hub... I would check there.

[@mnotgninnep]

@@joeturner7959 I have since obtained one and reverse engineered but not manufactured it. Unable to test as I don’t have time.

[@trr94001]

Daisy wheel printers, whether a typewriter or stand alone, were always slow but in the time before affordable laser printers they were the only true letter quality printing available.

[@highpath4776]

What you can do is change daisy wheels etc for different fonts, and indeed character sets which is fun

[@markb232]

Just curious, is the wheel in alphabet order or are the positions of the letters optimised so that common characters are together?

[@thethriftyfawn]

This was very cool and interesting to watch! 😊

[@DeLorean58]

That reverse engineering sounds like a job for Big Clive.

[@brentboswell1294]

I wonder if there was a tractor option. Having written term papers tortuously with a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 and a DWP-210 daisywheel printer, I can tell you that you could get 4-5 sheets of letter paper before the skew became so bad that you had to start printing again on the page where the skew started. The optional tractor with continuous feed paper was well worth the investment! PS the TRS-80 DWP-210 was a repackaged Diablo II printer, and used the same daisywheels and ribbons, and printed 20 characters per second, bidirectionally. It sounded like a machine gun when you gave it a big print job. It outlived several computers, eventually ending up in my dad's dental office, where it was used to print triplicate insurance forms, surviving until around the year 2000, when the ribbons became unavailable.

[@joeturner7959]

Very interesting idea, I wonder if this typewriter had a Diablo II mode, that offered bi directional printing.