Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

https://aschmelyun.com/blog/getting-my-daily-news-from-a-dot-matrix-printer/

by chrisdemarco • 2 years ago

904 253 2 years ago

ozarker• 2 years ago

I love it. I’ve switched a lot of my news consumption to RSS. This feels like another step in that direction that I’d love to try.

h2odragon2• 2 years ago

from '92 to '96 one of my jobs was producing a daily news summary from usenet and a feed of the Federal Register. delivered as 40 to 100 densely printed dot matrix pages. Couple boxes of paper a month. Re-inked ribbons so often they'd wear through.

The Epson LQ printers were incredible machines. the one (an a half) I used for that job did that, plus millions of mailing labels, with hardly a burp. There were some part swaps and a couple of printheads, iirc.

pcardoso• 2 years ago

Still have my LQ 100 in my parents attic, perhaps I could do something like this. Sadly I don't have the paper feeder (I only used A4 paper with it).

h2odragon2• 2 years ago

I pulled a couple out of my pile a few years ago to look at. The rubbers were pretty well gone on mine, belts gone, the rails had some sort of blooming corrosion.

unless you've got very lucky it's probably a real refurbishment job to make one run today. Quick look suggest Epson 9pin and 24pin form feed impact printers are still being made.

https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact-Dot-Matrix/LQ-590...

jprd• 2 years ago

This is fantastic. I'm all in on this, here I come eBay!

Odenwaelder• 2 years ago

I did something similar with a receipt printer, an Arduino and a PHP script in 2011. It got replaced by an iPhone very soon after, but I'm thinking of reviving it, because it forces you to filter what's important.

ortusdux• 2 years ago

I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'd definitely recommend BPA free paper if you don't use it already!

ale42• 2 years ago

Matrix printers can actually do quite a lot... depending on the models, you can change fonts, use bold, underline, sometimes italic, double-width and double-height characters and even graphics (although often are relatively low resolutions like 90 or 180 DPI).

One funny thing I did once for a escape-room-like game, was a box with only a parallel printer connector on it. When connected to the printer, it was parasite-powered from one of the control lines of the parallel port (it was just a tiny PIC microcontroller drawing a few hundred µA) and was sending a hint to the printer.

seanw444• 2 years ago

That's pretty cool actually.

schlauerfox• 2 years ago

My dad had a 4 color dot matrix printer in the 90s. Printing the pharaoh head from deluxe paint II took FOREVER but actually looked pretty. The paper was really warped after though. Still have it, but no idea where 4 color ribbons would be sourced.

sitkack• 2 years ago

You could probably make your own multicolor ribbon.

bitwize• 2 years ago

Back in the day, one of the first desktop publishing programs out there was called Fancy Font by SoftCraft. It was a CP/M and later DOS program, so not a WYSIWYG page layout tool like PageMaker. Instead it used text documents formatted with a simple markup language.

It originally worked by taking advantage of the high-resolution graphics mode present in Epson dot-matrix printers, which were capable of platen microadjustments as small as 1/3 the pitch between the pins in the print head, allowing for 3 times the vertical resolution the head alone could give. Fancy Font rendered the text on the computer and sent it as graphics in this special high-resolution mode, yielding results that were as close as you could get to typeset for home equipment in the early 1980s.

Later versions of Fancy Font had drivers for early laser printers like the OG HP LaserJet. But when the Mac came out... the writing was on the wall for such a system.

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

I’ve been wanting to explore more with this design-wise. There’s literally dozens of pages in the manual regarding font sizing, emphasis, italics, sub and superscripts, etc.

Maybe for version 2.0!

layer8• 2 years ago

It would be fun to have a terminal that understands ESC/P, supporting different fonts and CPI and the like.

smartmic• 2 years ago

I remember printing huge banners in landscape mode on those endless paper rolls, basically ASCII art stuff which commands like figlet would produce today on a terminal (maybe it still supports printers as output?)

milkshakes• 2 years ago

Additionally, since this is an experimental project, I wanted to remain super cheap for this data, free if at all possible.

There's also NewsCatcher which is free for open source side projects:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejrsj4a1ZQkIasiKCt...

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

Oooh, awesome! Thanks for the heads up

canpan• 2 years ago

This is great! I am currently thinking about getting a weekend paper newspaper like FT weekend. Reason being: I read news on my phone too often. And the news create negative emotion without being useful. News on paper and only once per week would make me more relaxed. His paper printer news daily would be great to bridge the gap in between!

On a side node: I love the dot matrix printer! Is there any hackable open source printer like this available?

i5heu• 2 years ago

I cannot recommend FT. I tried to get their physical paper, never got one and although I made 3 calls and wrote about 10 mails to them they only would escalate my ticket after I unsubscribed and demanded a refund, this was after 3 weeks and a lot of time on my side.

That is why I am also super interested in just printing news from the net for myself, so I do not need to keep watching on a screen.

eponeponepon• 2 years ago

Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round.

Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

My first reaction was "why print, just send it to yourself as an email" but then realized that the major motivator for this project was to cut down on screen use.

freetanga2• 2 years ago

Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions…

On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)

FredPret• 2 years ago

I miss the soundscape of old computers:

- the POST beep

- the sound a floppy drive makes after inserting

- the infernal scream of a dot matrix printer

- even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.

awiesenhofer• 2 years ago

Just today at a shop I saw a self checkout terminal crash and reboot - featuring the old AMI boot screen and a nice POST beep. Made me wonder what ancient hardware might hide behind these modern cases and UIs.

rockostrich• 2 years ago

If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop.

I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii [2] https://www.tamarashopsin.com/asgfaq/#/

toast0• 2 years ago

even I don't miss dial-up sounds though.

I do. It's like the walk-up song to talking to my friends and having a good time.

101011002• 2 years ago

Wi-Fi

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

post beep is a premium feature today!

most boards won't have any. if you pay premium, you get post beep. if you pay even more you get post stage led indicators.

so this item on your list is not about the past but enshitification.

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.

hansonkd4• 2 years ago

My current project right now with my thermal printer is responding to emails via typewriter.

Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner -> sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer.

PoC worked well.

Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic to do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify that the final content of the email after OCR.

So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to day.

More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess you would call them word processors) could be a better way... But I like the click clack of each key stroke.

tomjen34• 2 years ago

That is delightfully archaic.

May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?

alchemist1e9• 2 years ago

I can't afford a proper ASR-33

If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find one?

Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn’t produced anything in years.

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

The one that was in the Living Computer Museum was recently sold by Christie's.

beala• 2 years ago

I did this. Wrote it up here: https://notes.bayesup.date/Projects/The+Self-Typing+Typewrit...

rbanffy3• 2 years ago

You made my job a whole lot easier. Thank you!

mhandley• 2 years ago

Back in the early 1980s when I was maybe 15 I got one of the first Jupiter Ace computers. The Ace never sold well, so there wasn't a lot of software or hardware available, and even if there had been I didn't have the money. My school didn't offer computer science, so I arranged to cycle across town to another school that did. They had just got two Research Machines 380z's and were throwing out the ASR-33 they had previously used. Of course I scavenged it and took it home.

I'd previously built a parallel port for the Ace on veroboard from TTL logic, based on a design a friend of mine came up with for his ZX Spectrum, so I could use the Ace to ride around on a micromouse. To drive the ASR-33, I had a 24v smoothed power supply that I'd scavenged from a skip when my mother's employer had scrapped some prototype ATMs (cash dispensers), so I wired that up to give +/- 12V and switched that from one line on the parallel board using some power transistors desoldered from the ATM. Then I wrote code to bit-bang 110baud RS232 in Forth on the Ace. It took a lot of trial and error, as there wasn't exactly a lot of documentation available in the town library, but I got there in the end.

I'm not sure if I was the only person who ever had a printer connected to a Jupiter Ace, but I'm pretty sure I was the only person to print Ace code listings to an ASR-33. I wish I still had that ASR-33 but somewhere along the way my parents decided they were fed up with storing all my junk, asked what I wanted saving, and I didn't think to save that.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the dusty stock ticker in Mr Burns' office:

https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU

jollyllama• 2 years ago

I wonder how long before these pages fade. Could be good for archival purposes.

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

It’s physical ink on paper, I feel like as long as you store it in a cool, dry place, you can probably get decades out of it if not more.

r2_pilot• 2 years ago

From someone who hordes papers(j/k but if I don't get back to digitalizing them it might be considered more of a problem later on lol fortunately some of my reading and writing is supplanted by digital devices now)... You probably don't want to keep all of it. Most news doesn't even matter a week from when it was made. If you had to, it would be better to have an LLM or better summarize the year's end. Or maybe bury them in the backyard for future generations to potentially discover. But yeah there will be other copies of the news, and you don't have to store them these days

every• 2 years ago

It's been a long time since I've heard that dot matrix sound. Wide carriage OKI Data and a big pile of green bar...

aghilmort• 2 years ago

so pure -- easily as awesome as this lovely post, (What Hath Woz Wrought)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41561321

picturing room full of dot matrix printers, fax machines, & thermal printers & modems & old-school saving programs to cassette recordings

all talking to each other via mic relay where each uses AI to subtly detect what character each other just printed via audio and we can read their LLM convos

joeyparsons• 2 years ago

til you can still easily buy continuously feedable paper for dot matrix printers on amazon - was wondering if that was a scarce resource for a project like this! kudos!

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

It’s pretty expensive though! I got the smallest box I could, 1000 sheets, from Staples for $30.

tonyedgecombe2• 2 years ago

You can still buy new impact printers.

https://printronix.com/line-matrix-printers/

awad• 2 years ago

I've seen dot matrix still used at car dealerships so doesn't totally surprise me there'd still be plenty of industry uses

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

It’s great for printing on carbon copy duplicate/triplicate paper that needs to be signed one time on all copies.

Tor33• 2 years ago

I've seen dot matrix printers used in backrooms of airlines (which I have visited for reporting lost luggage, sometimes). This would mostly be smaller airlines (as the now defunct Berlin Air)

tomjen34• 2 years ago

I could see piping all syslog critial and above out to a .matrix printer that sits in a locked room as a cheap way to enforce a WORM log of events. With a continious sheet of paper you would only need to access it rarely, and essentially only to change the ribbon and replace the paper source.

exitb• 2 years ago

It seems like an attractive concept. I tend to fluctuate between consuming too much news and getting fed up leading to not consuming any.

BTW, I like how this is literally just a daily newspaper. Something that we’ve figured out at least hundreds of years ago, but effectively lost to an infinite breaking news cycle.

hansonkd4• 2 years ago

I did something similar with a receipt printer.

a thermal usb receipt printer is like $75 dollars and easily controlled by python. Super easy to print out images and QR codes. and the autocut functionality makes it easy to segment messages. Additionally the receipt printer is nice because you can activate the bell inside as an additional "notification" and has an extra control for a cash drawer that I am thinking of hooking into to control a light or something.

I had it set up for emails and every morning it would print off my calendar.

I think the interface works well especially if you pair it with a physical control like buttons or NFC reader. That way you can issue "commands" and get output. Like I had one NFC card to make it print my calendar, one for unread emails, etc.

I have some more features I want to add to it. Its very fun way to cut down on screen time, but ironically i have spent more screen time coding with it and setting it up then it probably has saved me. lol.

ustad• 2 years ago

Whats the printer you have? I’ve been thinking of getting one and did not know about the notification and external feature you mention.

hansonkd4• 2 years ago

I have a Rongta RP331.

The thing I wish it could do different is that when printing a single line, the autocutter hides it, so you have to line feed about 5 times until the line you printed is visible.

If i did it different, maybe i would try to find a printer that is able to do reverse line feed so I can "peek" at a single line and then not waste paper. but i think those are about 3-4 times more expensive.

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

There are a lot of cheap Chinese dot matrix printers. As an American if you search by mm size you will find those, if you search by inches you will find more reputable (and culturally sensitive) brands.

I bought two Chinese printers, one burned up pretty quick when I was testing it but I might have been printing too much black. The other is fine I think but really I am not so motivated to make thermal prints when I have a good quality inkjet. (My best thermal print was a small Lusamine

https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741

which demonstrates how Nintendo official art is designed to render on cheap screens like the Nintendo 3DS)

mtoohig• 2 years ago

Please share some of your code, I would like to see and get a feel for some personal ideas.

hansonkd4• 2 years ago

I am currently working on an "input" interface to scan resposnes that I write from my typewriter and am planning on releasing a github repo on it when im done. conveniently you can type directly on the receipt printer if the response is short.

Right now all my credentials are hardcoded so i can't push out what I have without some cleanup, but I can point you to some of the libraries: python-escpos and nfcpy were what I used for the bulk of it.

Instantnoodl• 2 years ago

I use Thermal Printer for a different use-case (TTRPG stuff). Feel free to check it out :)

https://github.com/BigJk/snd

autoexec2• 2 years ago

Receipt printers are fun but take care not to buy toxic paper https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/the-health-...

gzalo• 2 years ago

I wonder if it's feasible to make diy Thermal paper using lemon juice, like the old "invisible ink experiment"

amelius• 2 years ago

Does this warning also hold for thermal label printers?

I have this one: https://www.creativebloq.com/reviews-niimbot-d110

kragen6• 2 years ago

Assuming BPA is what you're worried about (it's not "toxic" by the usual definitions but still something you may want to avoid) there isn't another mainstream option.

z2• 2 years ago

The most mainstream phenol free thermal paper out there is one made from a branded chemical "pergafast" which is supposedly based off of urea. This is increasingly the type used by big brand stores where the paper is advertised as BPA and BPS free. It appears safe in studies so far in terms of not being absorbed through the skin nor endocrine disrupting, but is also known to be highly toxic to aquatic life. There's another chemical related to vitamin c branded "Alpha Free" but it's harder to find.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02732...

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

Receipt printers are a blast! I had a project from a couple years ago printing out GitHub tickets using a similar setup to what I have for this dot matrix printer.

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

Whatever vendor(s) decided that the restaurant industry needed to switch over to thermal printers, I hope Cory Doctorow has a chat with them.

"Let's just tape this thermal receipt to your to-go container, and ... refund? What do you mean refund?"

bombcar• 2 years ago

Thermal printers are cheaper because you only have to buy paper, no ribbon or ink.

However, thermal receipt printers at restaurants seem to be among the cheapest ones around - you can get thermal printers that result in receipts that withstand decent temperatures (but, obviously, not all).

Many shipping labels are printed by direct thermal printers and those labels stand up quite well. Check Zebra for examples.

nik282000• 2 years ago

Great minds. My thermal printer spits out the weather every morning and if any important devices fall off my network it prints a notification.

meling• 2 years ago

Last paragraph made me laugh

At least you did something cool with your screen time!

hggigg• 2 years ago

I had something similar to this at home except it was a laser printer and it got a postscript file out of LaTeX which was parsed out from a bunch of Perl.

A couple of months in, my naive Perl parser broke and I woke up to half a ream of paper with "a" printed continually down the left hand side of the page.

Now I don't bother!

acomjean• 2 years ago

In the early 90s my daily college paper had a dot matrix printer for the AP news feed. My last year I think they discontinued the service.

Editors would take the stories and type them into our system again. The agony was mitigated by the fact we didn’t run a ton of AP stories and better ways were entirely obvious back then.

Krasnol• 2 years ago

I miss the sound of those things. It was quite satisfying, and I'm not sure if it was because those were the first printers I've ever seen or because it really is a fascinating machine. That sound...as if someone would rip paper apart but nobody does and there are letters on it afterward...ASCII art was so awesome on them...

...my SO would kill me.

dugmartin• 2 years ago

Yes - the sound on the video reminded me of waiting for my homework to print out in the 80s.

The_Blade• 2 years ago

the sound is better than an hour with a high-end therapist, er, executive coach

bityard• 2 years ago

Neat. Reminds me of when I (briefly) worked at a radio station. I forget basically all of the details now, but I'm pretty sure it would automatically dial up some Associated Press number, fetch the latest headlines, and send them to a dot-matrix printer. This was in the late 90's and it ran MS-DOS.

In case the author is reading: on most printers of the day, you could set the font via control codes and many printers even had variable-width fonts.

Lonestar1440• 2 years ago

Legitimately great product idea, I think? Just the idea of a personalized (truly! by you! Not by MSN or whomever), off-screen news feed every morning is cool. The idea that I could *also replace my alarm clock with a dot matrix printer* is even cooler.

I could easily customize the php to hit my own news sources, but wouldn't know where to begin doing the hardware side on my own. Probably many others in this spot.

I'd buy it, for way more than the cost of an old printer, if it was available on the market!

tomjen34• 2 years ago

As someone who did something similar back in the day - it is actually pretty easy since you literally have to connect the printer (hardest part, as you will need adaptor cables) and then write to a dev output, which is just a file (assuming you want to run this on Linux).

efreak• 2 years ago

assuming you want to run this on Linux

If you're in DOS (not NT/XP+, not sure about 9x), you can use the debug command to write to the serial and parallel ports. You can also use `ECHO > COM1` for serial, or for the parallel port `ECHO > LPT1`

zackproser• 2 years ago

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

whartung• 2 years ago

So, curiosity today.

One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0.

Which is all you did back in the day. Shove text down the interface, and the printer printed.

Now, while we have very fancy modern printers, they're still printers with a long legacy. Even back in the day, early HP laser printers worked like this. Shove data down the wire, and it printed (Courier 10, 66 lines per page). Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.

As the printers evolved, the language that was sent to them got more complicated. But even so, they still had a long line of backward compatibility.

So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work? It wouldn't surprise me either way, but I'm just curious if someone knows. They're very black boxy today (to me anyway).

(Anyone else remember the joys of getting reports to fit on pre-printed, multi-copy NCR forms? What fun that was!)

dasfsi• 2 years ago

I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't).

What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason.

Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.

slsii• 2 years ago

I just tested this on OS X, which doesn't expose printers through /dev/ in the way you're describing as far as I can tell. But apparently lp exists on OS X, so you can do echo "Hello printer" | lp -d <printer_name>, and find the name through lpstat -p.

And sure enough, this works! Just tested on my new printer.

blenderob• 2 years ago

Wow! What a delightful exchange this is! Curiosity asked and answered in 12 minutes! I literally got goosebumps on my arms as I read your comment and reached the last part where you say "this works!"

hawski4• 2 years ago

With macOS there is this one off topic thing regarding printing that always gets me. I once had a company Macbook and it connected to my old Brother printer without problems and only then (after almost ten years of having the printer) I discovered it has double sided printing. It just worked. I always wondered if there is a way to connect somehow to this machinery to get a macOS printer driver or whatever and emulate whatever is needed for this to work on Linux.

sgt• 2 years ago

Works for me as well. This is a network printer available via WiFi.

account427• 2 years ago

The question then is, does this lp utility just feed the text directly to the printer or is it just a legacy compatibility layer that goes through the normal printing APIs to do its thing.

jahewson• 2 years ago

I guess your printer driver is free to emulate an LPT if it wants to.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

Thankfully even USB-connected printers emulate an LPT (see the other comment I left in this tree) and are very likely to accept one of the standard command sets as well as just plain ASCII.

It's similar to the terminal emulation situation: despite being decades old, the VT100 has become a de-facto terminal command set due to its popularity.

gpvos2• 2 years ago

Well, that's easy to check out as long as you have a printer connected. It's going to depend on the printer. Doesn't work on my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0 . Piping it to lpr works of course, as long as you have a default printer selected.

Once you've established that you can print basic text, you can expect that the printer's escape codes will work.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

Doesn't work on my Brother laser printer on Linux, even if I send some valid Postscript to /dev/usb/lp0

It's probably expecting ESC/P or PCL. Laser printers also usually wait for a formfeed before they will process a page.

zzo38computer• 2 years ago

Only the Apple Laserwriter didn't really do this (I don't think) because it was an exclusively PostScript printer. Instead, you shoved PostScript down the wire.

It would be possible to write a PostScript program that emulates ESC/P (or PCL), although then you would have to send an entire page (or a page break) before the page would be printed, unlike the old dot-matrix line printers that you can print one line at a time, PostScript can only print one page at a time.

mmmlinux2• 2 years ago

Its not like a laser printer can really print line by line though.

r3trohack3r• 2 years ago

You can even do this with network printers, netcat a pdf to the open port and it will print.

https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-with-ne...

rwky• 2 years ago

Just did this with my HP Envy injket and it worked, had no idea this was a thing it's very cool.

pm215• 2 years ago

Back when I was at school in the 1990s, there was a dot matrix printer in the computer room still, which was the default printer for any of the computers on the network. One of the classic user errors was that somebody would try to print a document from Word and it would send a load of PostScript to the dot matrix printer, which would dutifully print it all out as PostScript source, wasting paper and printer ribbon until somebody told the printer to stop...

yellowapple• 2 years ago

So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

I can't attest to whether piping directly to the device works, but I routinely do stuff like

    lpr -o raw -P $SOME_CUPS_PRINTER < $SOME_FILE

Back when I was doing warehouse IT work I'd hand-write ZPL code and shove it directly into Zebra printers for things like asset tags, printed instructions on equipment, etc. This was also my approach for various tools I wrote to automate the printing of packing slips and shipping labels - except these programs had to run on Windows machines, and I tell ya hwat Windows sure doesn't make it as easy as CUPS does.

More recently I dusted off that particular skillset in order to print a bunch of labels for my kitchen. ZPL really ain't that bad of a language; sure beats trying to write PostScript or PCL by hand :)

kn100• 2 years ago

I discovered this in the most amusing way ever accidentally a few years ago.

https://x.com/normankev141/status/1146547923758538755?t=oZrj...

text of tweet: So I bought a networked printer recently and as you do decided to try connecting to it a few different undocumented ways. I tried telneting to it. It turns out that whatever you type, it prints typewriter style. That was a pleasant and hilarious surprise. #internetofshit

saomcomrad56• 2 years ago

I wonder if this works with a sharp M205 I have in storage.

jolmg2• 2 years ago

One of the things that this person does is simply echo to /dev/lp0.
So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

Both of the following worked for me:

  printf 'hello\f' > /dev/usb/lp0
  printf 'hello\f' | nc -N $printer_ip 9100

This is on a Brother laser printer. Its programming guide is linked next to its manual online. The language is PCL, but you don't really need to know much about it to get simple stuff printed.

Neither of the above involve CUPS. Using the `lp`/`lpr` executable like in other comments requires the printer to be registered with CUPS first.

For `ls >`, the printer expects DOS line endings. `\n` just moves to a new line without "returning the carriage", so you need to pipe through `sed 's/$/\r/'` or use `nc -C`.

With the USB connection, you can print multiple times to build a single page and it won't come out until you provide the form feed. With the TCP connection, the page will be printed when the connection is closed.

mrighele• 2 years ago

Using the `lp`/`lpr` executable like in other comments requires the printer to be registered with CUPS first.

In modern Linux distros, lp/lpd are usually shims provided for backward compatibility, but it doesn't have to be that way. For example FreeBSD seems to provide support for lpd without for cups [1], although I don't see any real advantage in doing that.

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/printing/

fluoridation• 2 years ago

In my experience, inkjet printers can print line by line like teletypes, but laser printers can't.

heroiccocoa• 2 years ago

I wish we could go back to this uncomplicated UX. I just spent literally 2 hours setting up a brand new Epson ET-2850 printer for my dad. I'm quite disgusted at how slow, bloated and disjointed the process was. The printer ships with an android app, which worked fairly well, and, on the Epson website, some Microsoft Windows software, which was one of the worst software experiences I've ever had. The Wi-Fi setup is totally disjointed on the printer, app and windows release. You enter the Wi-Fi password via the app, which should then forward it to the printer. That's fine, it's better than using the dreadful printer interface. The printer saw the right SSID right away. No confirmation was given whether it connected or not. No big deal.

The software on their website was a Windows executable .exe file that seemed outdated even 10 years ago. To complete the last few steps, the printer network connection had to be set up once again, even though I had already previously connected it. Each attempt would take around 10-20 minutes, only to fail. The network errors and troubleshooting steps were incredibly generic and unhelpful. The worst part, until that point, was that the printer shipped with outdated firmware, and I did an online firmware update via the printer itself, confirming that the printer's Internet connection had indeed already been established. Rebooting the printer did not help. It turned out that, despite only just downloading the Windows executable that same hour from the Epson website, they were shipping an old version .exe, with some bug that causes the network setup to not be detected. However, it never prompted me to update. Only after restarting the Windows computer, and then re-opening the .exe, did some update trigger, and it allowed me to finish setting through to the last step of the installer to download the rest of the bloat and let the printer appear in the list of available printers on the network on the computer.

I then did a test print via an iPad. Took about 15 seconds.

fionaellie• 2 years ago

Wow. That brings back a lot of memories. Those escape codes, figuring how to insert a form consistently (line it up with the mark on the left, maybe click it three times or press an insert button to suck it in a bit), then continual adjustments until things mostly fit. Good memories!

housel• 2 years ago

Depends on when "back in the day" was; even in the mid-to-late 80s, especially if you were on a multi-user system, on BSD 4.2/4.3 local and networked printer access went through the Line Printer Daemon (still available on the BSDs).

For PostScript printers, there was a filter application (provided by Adobe) that would turn plain text (without the %! magic) into PostScript.

femto• 2 years ago

It's not installed by default, but the BSD (lp) interface is still available in Debian with

$ sudo apt-get install cups-bsd

TacticalCoder3• 2 years ago

So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

Many commented that it still works... This brought back good memories of sending native PostScript files to an HP LaserJet 4M+'s IP address, over the LAN, using netcat. Amazing stuff.

The gotcha of course is when the shit hits the fan: it can quickly degenerate into pages upon pages of garbage getting printed.

On the plus side back when things were, and still are, simple like that, typically just turning the printer of and terminating the command and you'd be good to go. As opposed to, say, weird spoolers/cache sometimes relaunching print jobs people thoughts were long gone.

kjellsbells• 2 years ago

God, that's a flashback. Desperately running NET STOP SPOOLER on an NT print server and then deleting some large SHD file because someone sent 789 pages of manuals to the printer. Sigh.

kalleboo2• 2 years ago

it can quickly degenerate into pages upon pages of garbage getting printed

This is still a thing... I was setting up a modern Brother laser printer in FreeBSD (Brother only supplies Linux "PPDs" which run a bunch of binary blobs with Ghostscript and weird stuff) and figured it was easy enough so I did it remotely. Could only watch helplessly on the security camera as the printer spit out every page in it's paper cassette covered in junk... Remote stop commands did nothing.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

So, if I plug a USB printer into a computer, and ls > /dev/usbXXX, will it print today? Does that still "just work"?

For those who want to look into the horse's mouth, USB printing device class:

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbprint11a021811.pd...

"Printers have two different types of commands: those that transfer data, and those that control the USB interface or printer interface. The host prints something on a printer by delivering data on the Bulk OUT endpoint. This data may take the form of PostScript, HP PCL, or any other PDL. This data may also be encapsulated in a PCP, such as IEEE 1284.1, or something that is vendor-specific. In addition, the data may also be simple text, or it may be a proprietary PDL."

The rest of the spec makes it very clear that this is intended to work exactly like a standard parallel port at the "application layer". Use the bulk OUT endpoint to write data to the printer, and the bulk IN to read data from it. There is a status request that returns the same signals (out of paper, etc.) that a parallel port has.

If I do that with an EPSON and send it EPSON MX-80 escape codes -- does it still work?

ESC/P and ESC/P2 which followed are backwards-compatible and based on the MX, so likely yes.

hiidef2• 2 years ago

Hacker invents the newspaper

hiidef2• 2 years ago

hacker invents the newspaper

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

The most interesting part of the article for me was the Gathering the Data section.

Because honestly, this would be a project better targeted for a large e-ink display. Maybe you've even seen the photo of the large wall-hanging e-ink display that in fact displays the day's news [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/11febnk/eink_newspape...

fivestones• 2 years ago

The photo is still there by the original post is gone. Any idea what e-ink device that is?

whall62• 2 years ago

Why can’t people just simply exercise self control

chwilson• 2 years ago

There are teams of potentially 100+ at big tech companies who’s sole purpose is to make their flavor of feed as addictive as neuron-activationally possible

whall62• 2 years ago

So we should just accept our fate. Got it

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

I ask myself the same thing every day

bubblesnort• 2 years ago

It got stuck in 1984.

dudinax• 2 years ago

Purposeful avoidance of temptation is self control.

krylon• 2 years ago

Until very recently, dot matrix printers were still common in doctors' offices in Germany (for reasons), and the sound they make always gives me huge wave of nostalgia, even bigger than hearing a fax/modem emitting its handshake sound.

kjs3• 2 years ago

I periodically run into them in places that still use multipart forms (e.g. manufacturing, shippping/logistics).

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

I was at a tires place that still uses them as of last month.

forinti• 2 years ago

When I was in school, I would use an Epson LX80 to print a stencil for a Mimeograph. I would remove the tape so that it would hit the stencil harder.

I still have the printer in a box. It's all yellowed out. Oh, the memories...

G_o_D• 2 years ago

Back in time: Dont have fancy big screen monitors just echo > /dev/lp0. Like Redirect output to physical stdout

thesurlydev• 2 years ago

This is fantastic. I can't remember the last time I've interfaced with a dot matrix printer. It might have been in college getting a print out of Fortran programs. Thanks for sharing!

behindai• 2 years ago

Very environmental

donohoe• 2 years ago

And there you have it folks - print is back! The old monolithic newspaper execs were right after all.

That aside, this is a neat project and might be a fun weekend task.

acka3• 2 years ago

OP, are you sure that your printer has a serial port? That would be somewhat unusual I think, back in the day when I used many dot matrix printers, they all had parallel (Centronics) ports. The same model printer in the one eBay listing I found (sold, maybe bought by you?) also has a parallel port, clearly visible in a photo of its backside.

sanex• 2 years ago

The link he provided to the adapter is a parallel to USB adapter even though he has it called a serial one.

acka3• 2 years ago

Ah, that explains it. Thanks for pointing this out.

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

Yep, parallel! My bad, I’ll have to make some adjustments to the article.

mmmlinux2• 2 years ago

I was wondering how he plugged it in and magically there was /dev/lp0. but it makes more sense if its a parallel than a serial adapter.

cbm-vic-20• 2 years ago

I've got a DEC LA75 Companion Printer that uses serial. Still works.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/54829/DEC-LA75-Compa...

Tor33• 2 years ago

Even though they typically came with Centronics ports, you could often add an additional interface. The Epson-compatible OKI printer I have can use an additional interface board (of which I have one) and have both a serial and parallel interface. And of course there are also those console printers which uses serial like the DEC LA printer mentioned in a sibling comment.

acka3• 2 years ago

Interesting, nice to know!

PaulHoule2• 2 years ago

For a while I’ve been printing “three-sided cards” which have an image on one side and a QR code with documentation on the other side

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111013706271196029

the “third” side is the web site linked by the QR code.

I got bored with photography and made up a character who goes around with a cheap lens and always keeps the aperture around f/18 or more, uses heavy processing, color grades and shoots a standard non-standard aspect ratio so it looks like he’s using some weird camera from an alternate timeline.

I just started printing this series and came to the conclusion that 4x5 can be easily made by cutting down a 4x6 but instead of cutting it I’d have an inch to put in a QR code and documentation on the front: similarly I could cut down a 5x7 to a square 5x5 and fit documentation in there. I have a few boxes of glossy paper that aren’t printable on the back and I think I’m going to use the, that way. (Found out later that instagram has a 4x5 standard and that my sports photos taken with a good lens really look good in that format)

One question though is what the documentation looks like and I am split between: (1) minimal changes to what I have, (2) some kind of fake dot matrix or other effect that looks like an old printer that might have been built into that fantasy camera or (3) something that makes he most of what the inkjet printer can do.

left-struck• 2 years ago

I genuinely want to understand your comment but I feel like it, or I, are missing a lot of context. Almost every paragraph seems to be completely unrelated to the last one.

technothrasher• 2 years ago

The headline gave me flashbacks of doing the Friday morning news slot for my college radio station back in the early 90's, and printing out the stories off our news feed that I wanted to read on the stations big noisy dot matrix printer.

waymon• 2 years ago

This is awesome. Well done.

guerrilla• 2 years ago

Leave it to a PHP programmer to immediately disregard the security system as soon as he encounters it. ;)

Interesting though. Been reading sbout old teletypes the last few days, so this is quite fitting for me.

chillpenguin• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that old printers like that go for $80-120 USD. I'm pretty sure you can buy a new inkjet for $50.

If I wanted to do something similar, what is the cheapest type of printers I should be looking at? Dot matrix does seem awesome for the vibes, but I could be happy with something else as well. Any recommendations? I do like the idea of buying something old.

AlfredBarnes• 2 years ago

I am also in this boat. I don't want to have to buy in for ink for $50 every 3 months.

vetrom• 2 years ago

Nifty project, this also reminds me of m68k.news which I think was on here a few years back. (source: https://github.com/ActionRetro/68k-news )

throwup238• 2 years ago

I'd use the Wikipedia current events portal [1] to generate the headlines/news. It’s less sensationalist that news headlines and contains a lot more global news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

aaronfc• 2 years ago

Didn't know about this! Thanks :)

neilv• 2 years ago

I used the sell Epson dot-matrix and laser printers, when I was 15 or so. And I also had an old, used Star Micronix Gemini 10X at home, before I got the Epson dealer employee discount.

It's hard to make out the dots in the photo, but I'd guess this is probably around a 24-pin, printing in near-letter-quality (NLQ) mode, and (barely) doing true descenders.

Note how straight the vertical lines of the line-drawing-character box at the top. If it was alternating printing one line while moving the printhead to the right, then the next line while moving printhead left, the slight imprecision of the drive in many printers would tend to be visible when the pixels of the line don't quite line up. Or if it's doing NLQ mode, it might be printing bidirectionally on the same line, overlapping dots, and might be more forgiving.

I would guess this model probably has features like italic and bold (or at least double-strike), maybe condensed, double-wide, toggle from 10cpi and 12cpi, etc. And you can usually mix those within a page, like you know that you can print twice as many characters horizontally at condensed in just a small spot of the page, and do the layout arithmetic based on that. That printer might also do bitmaps, and/or let you define characters.

If you can't find the doc for a particular model, but it might be some degree of Epson-compatible, search for "epson esc/p printer" documentation, and see what codes work. And know about form-feed, for a smooth finish to your page.

Or, if you you just want to treat it as an 80x66-character array, but get a little fancy within that, in a one-hour project, you can make a shell script that fetches data with Curl, generate HTML, and pipe it through something like `w3m` or `elinks` for formatting. Or use Svelte and pull in 100 packages from NPM to print to the vintage thing.

For a more telegram-y aesthetic, you might be able to source yellow paper (search keywords "tractor-feed", "continuous form"), preferably unperforated. For more computer-y, search keyword "greenbar". A 9-pin or similar printer will look more vintage than the crisp one in the article, or you can try running a 24-pin in draft/fast mode.

chihuahua• 2 years ago

I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years. It seems like an admission that the quality was better than before, but still not great. Sounds a bit quaint - if printers were new in 2024, 9-pin printers would be "high quality", 2-pass printing would be "super quality", and 24-pin printing "extreme quality"

In the video, you can see it's doing both of the techniques you mentioned: each line in printed in 2 passes, both in the same direction, presumably for better alignment. But the next line is printed in the opposite direction, again with 2 passes.

In the 1980s, I had first a 9-pin printer (Star SG10) and then a 24-pin printer (NEC P6)

TacticalCoder3• 2 years ago

I have to chuckle at hearing the euphemism "NLQ" for the first time in over 30 years.

At the same 30 years ago there were already printers doing 1200 DPI (HP had them by early 1996 for sure: I was there). This beats the shit out of retina displays. And yet they're called "retina displays". That one makes me chuckle much more!

sneak• 2 years ago

News headlines can cause just as much cognitive negative influence as news websites.

Just skip the news entirely. It’s an utter waste of time. Your life will be better for it.

Applejinx• 2 years ago

I was looking for this comment as I saw one of the NYT headlines manufacturing counterfactuals towards whatever end. It cites a politician looking at worker migration to small, struggling towns, "and he fueled a fire that was already smouldering".

My understanding of THAT story is that the town is very protective of the black workers who moved there to work, and that it wasn't the politician but his subordinate who 'turned his sights' there, and did so to say horrible things about those people with no evidence. That's my understanding of what that story is. To claim 'he fueled a fire that was already smouldering' seems a wildly irresponsible thing to say as a headline.

Maybe try pulling from the Associated Press? I'm a bit at a loss. You can at least avoid bad faith headlines.

yhager• 2 years ago

Obligatory link: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

There were startups back in the dot com boom days that were doing this when the internet first came out. "No need for newspaper delivery! You'll get it printed right at your house."

Today it probably seems nearly unimaginable to teens that we used to have to get newspapers delivered and before you got the paper you just didn't know what had happened.

bobek• 2 years ago

Perfect, I do the same thing for daily quote.

codazoda2• 2 years ago

I’m fascinated with printing calculators. Does anyone know of a printer that will print on calculator paper roles and print A-Z numbers and some symbols, like demonstrated here?

Edit: Looks like I just need a receipt printer, which comes in dot matrix or thermal. Whoa, I need one.

aaronblohowiak• 2 years ago

Like a thermal printer in general or specifically attached to a calculator?

codazoda2• 2 years ago

There’s just something about the paper rolls. I was thinking dot matrix. I suppose either would work. I might buy one and do something like op did.

Tor33• 2 years ago

I have a Seiko thermal printer, from years back. With at least one roll of paper. I think they still make them, or something which looks very similar.

wgrover• 2 years ago

Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer:

https://github.com/wgrover/jamie

The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries.

The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.

chaps• 2 years ago

Many years ago I worked at a company that had to print out every transaction with a dot-matrix printer every evening. It was my group's job to do very minimal maintenance on it like adding toner/paper and such. When filling the toner though, you had to screw the toner container onto a special.... gyrating.... setup just to make sure all toner came out. A thing that struck me about it was how uncannily, uh, sexual, it was in its gyrations.

Does anybody have any idea what model of printer this might have been? I'd love to see a video of it again.

Animats• 2 years ago

I had this machine connected to a news feed for years.[1] It's the mechanism from a Model 14 Teletype tape printer. It's still in my living room, and the tape feeds out into a wire basket. It's driven by a Python program running on an old EeePC subnotebook.

[1] https://aetherltd.com/refurbishing14.html

sixothree• 2 years ago

Beautiful machine.

aschmelyun9• 2 years ago

That is absolutely fantastic. I've always wanted to get my hands on one to mimic a ticker-tape with updating stock/crypto prices. One day!

Also, EeePC is something I haven't heard about in so long. That took me back!

snickmy• 2 years ago

Glass onion's vibes

AshamedCaptain• 2 years ago

And in the movie this was being use as a parody, to emphasize how much of a cargo culter the enterpreneur was...

0x0• 2 years ago

A large chunk of that php code could probably be replaced with a call to https://www.php.net/wordwrap

capitainenemo• 2 years ago

A long time ago we used to output certain key server logs summarised to a dot matrix printer. It was a neat place to see the history at a glance, but the idea was also that it was an unhackable audit. Probably done more efficiently with WORM drives nowdays, but without that immediate tactile presence.

yalok• 2 years ago

I remember printing the whole K & R "The C programming language" book on my dot-matrix printer, with some roll-paper, and then drilling the pages through to staple it with some thick paper clips wires. Legendary devices.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

80 trips through a hole punch will also do it.

fdfgyu• 2 years ago

I was just looking at buying a dot matrix printer for plotting data.

Everything about dot matrix printers suck for data, except the roll of paper that can print arbitrarily long logs.

To the community, other than a dot matrix, what other roll paper based printers can I use for this?

gaudystead• 2 years ago

Receipt printer, maybe? Depends how wide you need it to be though.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

I kinda want a ticker tape printer.

keroton• 2 years ago

This is the most Hacker News post ever made

tomjen34• 2 years ago

Only if the project was implemented in Erlang.

mesh• 2 years ago

This brings back so many memories. When I was in graduate school in the mid 90s (economics and European politics), it was difficult to get detailed, daily news in English on Eastern Europe. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was one of the best resources, with a daily email with an overview of news from the region.

I would print this out every single day on an old dot matrix printer so I could then take it to the library where I would read it with everything else.

Can find the archives (in a not very user friendly format) here: https://www.rferl.org/Newsline

btw, second best source of daily news in English in Eastern Europe was shortwave.

ketanmaheshwari• 2 years ago

Somewhat relevant, I use this little script to open front page of NYTimes daily morning on my macbook:

d=$(date +%d)

m=$(date +%m)

y=$(date +%Y)

wget -q https://static01.nyt.com/images/$y/$m/$d/nytfrontpage/scan.p... && open ./scan.pdf

mawise• 2 years ago

I made an RSS feed of these front-page images a while ago if anyone wants to use them:

https://nytonline.net/rss

collinmanderson• 2 years ago

Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

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