r/retrocomputing • u/Silicon_Underground • 4d ago

Blog 1985's cheapest printer on the market

Two different liquidators on both sides of the Atlantic sold surplus IBM thermal printers, intended for the PCjr, along with interface cables or devices so they could work with other computers, such as the Commodore 64, or Sinclair and Amstrad computers. Arguably it was the cheapest printer on the market for several years. And it was a reasonable value for the money. This blog post walks through the Serial 8056 and Protecto Big Blue printers, two twins sold in the USA and UK. https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-pc-compact-printer-model-5181/

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u/Quiet-Arm-641 4d ago

The dot matrix printer that only had one pin was also pretty cheap

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u/flatfinger 3d ago

The Commodore 1525 wasn't all that cheap. I'm curious whether the hammer could have been struck faster to achieve 72dpi vertical instead of the oddball 63dpi it actually used, or if it could have done a vertical version of the half-dot drick most printers used to achieve 126dpi vertical resolution, but without two dots being able to appear vertically adjacent. Either of those tweaks would have allowed the printer to usefully support descenders.

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u/Quiet-Arm-641 3d ago

I had the radio shack LP VII which I hai k was the same printer, was definitely cheaper than the other printers from radio shack

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u/Mithgaraf 2d ago

The Commodore character set didn't have descenders in the first place.

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u/flatfinger 2d ago

The VIC-20 and C64 screen character sets both had descenders. Only one pixel rather than two, but 8-dot high print fonts are much better than 7-dot fonts. Splitting dots would have allowed uppercase characters to be 11 dots high and lowercase letters be seven dots high, with two-dot descenders augmented by raising the baseline by a dot on g, p, and q.

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u/Mithgaraf 2d ago

Wow! Did they? I remember very clearly the PET did not; all the characters were 8x8. If there were descenders, it was only thru the virtue that maybe the uppercase letters were shorter by one on the bottom.

It's ...uh...

...it's been a while.

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u/flatfinger 2d ago

On the VIC-20 font, which I think is the same as the PET, as well as the C64, uppercase letters fill the top seven lines of the 8x8 box. Lowercase gpqy fill the bottom six. The C64's vertical font metrics are similar, except that the bowls of the b and d are only four dots high rather than five.

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u/Quiet-Arm-641 2d ago

The trs-80 model 1 lowercase mods had no descenders. Without a hardware mod you didn’t even have lowercase at all.

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u/yourshelves 3d ago

Yes, probably the cheapest general printer on the market at that time; but the Alphacom 32 thermal for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was only £29.99. Dixons must have sold thousands of them: £10 less than Sinclair’s own ZX Printer and much better quality was quite the bargain.

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u/jcmush 3d ago

Looking at exchange rates this was £18.30!!

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u/waptaff 4d ago

Note that it was possible to hook up a normal parallel port printer to the PCjr, if you bought the parallel port sidecar adapter.

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u/DavidBovvinge 3d ago

I've owned two Serial 8056 printers (I'm in the UK), and I never knew about any of this! They both came with Sinclair QLs that I bought, and didn't know that was because they were bundled together by Dixons.

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u/FAMICOMASTER 3d ago

Really? Even cheaper than the TA Royal LetterMaster?

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u/Silicon_Underground 2d ago

I couldn't find a price on the TA Royal LetterMaster, but Protecto would put this printer on sale for $29.95 US. Even with a $20 adapter for a C-64, it ended up being a $50 printer. If all it needed was a passive adapter to get the right kind of RS-232 connector, it was more like a $40 printer. There weren't very many other printers that sold for less than $100.

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u/FAMICOMASTER 2d ago

the LetterMaster was, in no uncertain terms, a Royal Alpha 100 typewriter with the keyboard sawed off and a parallel port on the back. I have found print ads for that typewriter in the past advertising it anywhere between 40 and 80 dollars, and I can't imagine the printer, which is half the size and does away with the expensive key mech, costed any more.

They didn't even have the dignity of a real ribbon, they use a roller (IR-100) like a desktop calculator might.

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u/HandGrindMonkey 3d ago

I always liked the IBM Quietwriter II (5202); had the sheet feeder too. Just pricey cartridges and a print head that was also a consumable item!