Printing a Christmas Banner on an Old School Dot-Matrix Printer

[@RobertBoerner]

As someone who grew up in the Conmodore era, I can attest to how very popular Print Shop was back then. You constantly saw signs and banners printed with the software everywhere. Brøderbund also made a Toy Shop application that let you print components for toys (it also included basic craft materials in the box)

[@Darkk6969]

I used to have that exact same printer in the video. It was hooked up to my Commodore Amiga 500 in the late 1980s. It took forever to print anything in color but it worked.

[@RacerX-]

Great Video. That is one of my favorite printers. I have the 1000C Rainbow. The C means it is made for Commodore Computers and has built in Commodore serial ports and PETSCII support. It has been a great printer. It is a shame they do not make the ribbons any longer as the color is pretty cool. There was a company (Around The Office) that made them up until about 3 years ago or so. I have wondered who they had make them and if they could do another batch. Thankfully the black ones are still recently manufactured. For my Amiga I used the Star NX-2420 Rainbow which was the 24-pin super fast big brother. Such great printers and I printed out a ton of stuff back then.

[@jgharston]

I used to print out my family tree diagrams on a continuous feed printer. It's ideal when your diagram is 12 inches tall but 20 feet across. With a page printer I have to print out dozens of sheets and then stick them together. The Star printers were wonderful little things, robust, economical, reliable. Mine was (I think) an LC100. Was? What do I mean "was"? It's in the basement somewhere.

[@robwebnoid5763]

Nice to see younger generations get into vintage computing. I still have my NX-1000-ii (non-color version), which I got back in the late 1980's. Still works & I have a re-inking machine with plenty of ink for many more years to come for this machine & all my other different impact printers, about 8 or so. I have printed out banners before with the impact printers but that was so long ago. When we got a laser printer for the first time in the mid 1990's, that was so much easier & faster to make posters with big fonts. I also did plenty of programming for these printers, changing the fonts & stuff. I still also have all my C-64 stuff as well. We did have a color impact printer too at one point, a Panasonic, iirc, but that unfortunately got thrown away at least 15 years ago. Did you know that Star Micronics company still exists? They exclusively make Point of Sale stuff these days. We used impact dotmatrix printers for business/office up until only a few years ago, of which we finally closed down our business that had been running for over 40 years, since 1980. But I will continue to use these printers for other stuff when needed. 01/18/24

[@bradnelson3595]

That put a little Christmas Spirit in me. That was fun to watch. I'm pretty sure I had some kind of dot matrix printer. But I think it was one attached to an early Macintosh. I hope you can find some colored ink for your printer. And your fellow residents in the house should love the banner. Get some colored markers and fill in and otherwise put some color to that banner. It could make a fun group project. They'll be wanting you to print out more.

[@jgharston]

One summer in the 1980s I had an IT teaching job, and one of the systems we used was exactly that banner printout program!

[@gregferguson7737]

Nice to see this in action

[@jack6539]

Ahh, the 1980s. I had exactly this printer - first with a C64 and then with the amiga. Both paid for with my paper round money (and yes, that took a long time to save up enough). Funny story, a teacher got me to write 100 lines as punishment for something (I can't remember what). I got home and I wrote a basic program on the C64 and had it print off the 100 lines with NCQ(?) settings. My teacher complimented me on my typing skills. Lol.

[@pookiewookie7679]

Nice video! How I miss the 80s. Merry Christmas

[@zaprodk]

There is no friction between the paper and the print head. The print head works by powering solenoids that pull in iron armatures that push the needles into the paper. The coil in the solenoid heats up.

[@trevorbryant4360]

We had that same printer and used it with the C-64C. Remember having a Garfield print program along with that Print Shop program.

[@JamesPalylyk]

Yyyyyuuup, late Gen Xr here. We even took in a daisy wheel printer, complete with a wood veneer and pexiglass sound isolation booth for it. Why? Ask my step dad. We did the birthday banner thing, along woth the tri-colour printer ribbon. :)

[@parliamentarian6598]

I will forever have the sound of my star lc-10 burned into my memory

[@kellingc]

I used to destroy the ribbons on my high school's computer lab using Print Shop on the Apple //e computer lab. This was in about 1984 or so.

[@PsychoFox75]

I used the same printer with the Amstrad CPC 464. Printing banners was so much fun. I wasted a lot of ink and paper.

[@matthiastilly5480]

Almost my exact setup (except my printer was the Star LC 20 (only black and white)) - but looked very similar. And Printshop was the hot shit :) I also had a tool called "Create with garfield" where you could create some one-pic garfield comics and print them out..... My parents loved to hear that printer sound at 7 on a saturday morning 🤣

[@azimuth2142]

I had the (pretty sure it was this this model) LC100 monochrome. Fantastic machine. I did have and use a 24 pin colour Star printer also.

[@rudyiraheta80]

world of commodore from printmaster plus

[@AlexDiesTrying]

Wheee, my first one was the worst, a Commodore MPS 801 with seven, not eight, needles, who couldn't even print straight. Printshop. Feast yer eyes on the resolution of the graphics ( : Sadly I sold it but at least I kept my Citizen 120D To be fair: printshop had truly horribly cheap graphics. Printmaster was a bit better. A software I used a lot was Printfox. Although not for banners.

[@EgoChip]

These noisy things never got on well with my autistic brain. I hate the sound of them so much, it's worse than children crying.