They don’t make them like that any more: Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer
Epson released the MX-80 in 1980, before the company was even called Epson. It was an immediate hit, and went on to become the best-selling printer of the decade, despite not being cheap: its UK list price was equivalent to about £2000 in today’s money.
The MX-80 was, I think, the last printer I didn’t hate.
Yes, it was slow and noisy, with unimpressive text quality. Any throw-away laser printer from Staples will out-perform it in any way in which performance can be measured, except one: hatefulness. We loathe these modern printers with a passion, but we didn’t hate dot matrix printers in the 80s.
Why?
Well, because they actually worked. And they went on working, day after day, year after year. Modern printers are notorious for letting us down when we most need them. Need that report tomorrow? Tough. Printer manufacturers have responded to the declining sales of their products, not by making them better, but by finding ways to scalp their owners for the cost of consumables. And then, because consumers naturally look for cheaper, 3rd-party suppliers of consumables, the printer manufacturers retaliate by using encryption technologies to prevent the printer accepting any consumables but OEM ones.
Hewlett-Packard is even trying to move to a subscription model for toner cartridges, so customers will have to pay by the month. It’s telling that HP ran an advertising campaign using the slogan “Built to be hated less”. We have to laugh, I guess, since the alternative is to weep: everything HP has done recently makes us hate their printers more and more.
Like most of the printers you can buy in Staples or PC World, the MX-80 was designed for home or small business use, rather than heavy commercial load. Unlike a modern printer, it came with a hundred-page manual, clearly written by somebody who gave a damn. This manual included details of connecting the MX-80 to popular computers of the day, like the Tandy TRS-80, along with dozens of programming examples in BASIC.
Although it was expensive to buy, the MX-80 was cheap to run – the opposite situation from the one we find today. A replacement printer ribbon cost about £5 in today’s money, and was good for about a million characters. If even £5 were too expensive, I’m told you could re-ink the ribbon – although, to be honest, I never saw this done successfully. Even the print head was user-replaceable, which meant that the MX-80 could potentially last forever: there were few other moving parts.
Although it was sized for the desktop, and reasonably portable, the MX-80 was a solid machine, that looked as if it were built to last. I suspect that all the MX-80s ever made – those that haven’t ended up as land-fill – would still work today. I still see one from time to time, in a warehouse or a car inspection yard or something of that nature. You can still buy replacement ribbons for them, and they still cost a fiver.
Of course, the MX-80 wasn’t quiet or fast. It took about two minutes to print a full page of text, and the noise was just appalling. The sound of a 1980s dot matrix printer is immediately recognizable if you’ve heard one, and indescribable if you haven’t. Many users bought, or built, sound-proof boxes to operate them in, because otherwise the noise was unbearable.
Although it wasn’t fast, the MX-80 did have some performance-enhancing features that improved on its predecessors. For example, it could print in both directions. That was a bigger deal in 1980 than it might appear, because bidirectional printing requires the ability to buffer text and process it, which in turns requires some computational ability. It also tried to calculate the fastest way to seek the print head to the right place when feeding lines. Again, this process requires a bit of intelligence, as well as a way to read ahead.
The MX-80 only had a 9x9-pin print head, so it was never going to offer letter quality. With that resolution it’s just possible to print recognizable descenders (tails of letters like ‘g’ and ‘q’), rather than raising the whole letter to the baseline. So it wasn’t the worst print quality in the world. In general, though, text rendering was pretty poor by modern standards, although perfectly readable.
The original MX-80 was designed for tractor-feed, fan-fold paper. Once set up, the feed mechanism was rock-solid; it could print unattended all night, and there was never a risk of jamming. There was a friction-feed add-on for single sheets of plain paper, but I never used it. The problem with fan-fold paper was that we had to separate the individual sheets manually, and remove the perforated edges. This was a tedious process, particularly with a long document, but that’s not the fault of the printer.
I believe the MX-80 was the first printer to support a control language: as well as accepting plain ASCII characters and a handful of others, the computer could send codes to change the text size and quality, and move the print head to a specific point. Eventually there was a firmware upgrade that provided some limited dot graphics support, again driven by control codes. With the right software – which you’d probably have to write yourself – the MX-80 could plot graphs and render photographs, newspaper-style. So far as I know, modern Epson printers still accept the MX-80 control language, although they extend it.
In short, the MX-80 was the first, reasonably-affordable, completely reliable printer designed for microcomputers. Later models in the same series improved on the text quality – usually by using more pins on the print head – and speed, but I’m not sure the robustness and reliability were ever bettered.
I suspect that most computer users think that dot matrix printing is obsolete – if they’ve ever even heard of it. Not so: they’re still used in environments where absolute reliability is required. They’re particularly good for filling in pre-printed forms, like MOT inspection certificates. In fact, Epson still makes them. The LQ-350 is a very similar machine to the MX-80 – still a 9-row print head, but with a USB interface you wouldn’t have found in 1980. The newer model has less of an industrial look, but that’s just the whim of fashion.
Epson actually publishes service life expectations for its dot matrix printers – I’ve not found comparable data for any modern laser printer, and I suspect it would be shaming. The LQ-350 is rated at 10,000 hours continuous printing duty: that amounts to an hour a day, every day, for seventeen years. I’ve had modern laser printers that lasted only a couple of years.
So, if printer manufacturers continue to throw away what little goodwill their customers have left, I suspect that my next printer will be a dot matrix.
