I just found a Microline 186 at work, and they let me have it. I'm really excited to finally have my own dot matrix printer. I think I'll take it back to university in the fall because it is so small, and then I won't have to deal with the damn university printers. My 186 even has USB, and Windows 10 recognizes it.
This was one of Oki's lower end models, did the same as the others but was meant for a lower duty cycle and wasn't as fast and robust. That printer does INDEED have DIP switches. There is a small rectangular cover at the back of the top cover, in there are the switches. You can set things like characters sets, lines per page, slashed zeroes, etc. I have an Oki ML 182, the younger brother to this one. For some reason its power supply has an angry buzz when it's on, but still works. When you send it a full page graphic and the printhead gets hot, it starts printing slower. It doesn't take much to overload the printhead on these. If it gets hotter still it will pause and allow itself to cool. Some higher end models have fans to assist with cooling. I used an IBM ProPrinter XL wide-format 9-pin throughout school and college. Allowed me to "cheat" in college. When they wanted 15 pages, they got that. But the amount of text was less. I used plain old text, in NLQ. These printers will print fixed-space, so an "I" will take up the same amount of space as a "W". That allowed for less characters per line, stretching the page count slightly. Also, double-spacing on these printers is a little longer vertically than double-spaced text in Word, for example, that also further extended the page count. Pretty sneaky, but it worked! Of course I had an inkjet at the time, but why waste the ink for school stuff? There was nothing like waiting for 15 pages double-strike NLQ at 11:30 at night. The lowest resolution is there because the printer supports it! The problem is, in Windows, the text you're sending it is too high of a resolution, so it has to down-scale it. When you down-scale that much, it looks like crap. If you use a program of the day with that printer, such as PrintMaster from the 80s, it will look great because it's sending it low-res stuff to begin with, so there's no scaling. The middle setting is about right for most stuff, and provides acceptable print speed, in fact, it would rival some early inkjets (HP QuietJet, cough cough). I have a video on the PaceMark 3410 printer, it's a wide-format, high-speed 9-pin, it blows away any other printer I've seen. Especially if you send it low-res stuff, it just plain FLIES out of there. Puts these little jobbies to shame, but for back when, for a home printer, these were great. According to some quick research, this printer allows serial connections as well. It seems there's a door the slides down over the parallel to reveal the serial. I'm only going by some quick reference material. But if that's the case, and you have the space, you can have your Apex and this one hooked up, one parallel, one serial. Windows will even spool jobs to both simultaneously. I would seriously consider installing the Generic/Text-Only driver as well for the same printer, that way if you have plain text you can send it to the printer in its native format. MUCH faster, and certainly acceptable print quality on NLQ, plus you have the front-panel selectability of Utility or HSD. (Underline is the only feature available in HSD on these, if you remember printer ESC codes and how to use them). A good, old fashioned word processor like Professional Write makes this seamless. With the right ESC codes (or a good program) you could make super- and sub-scripts like H2O but the 2 would be descended. There was tons of cool stuff you could make them do. I even wrote a program in BASIC when I was like 10 that made use of all the codes. There are print pitches available, more so than what can be selected from panel. You could do double-wide, sometimes double-high, and get all kinds of pitches from 5, 6, 8.5, 10, 12, 17, sometimes even 15 was available (and higher end printers even supported 20). The pitches were intuitive since it was all fixed-space text. An 8 inch line, at 10 characters per inch would be 80 characters, same as a plain text 80 column screen! Fancy stuff! If you went to 12CPI, you got 96. At 17, you got 136. So that means at 17CPI, you could get the same printout you'd get on 13" green-bar paper, squeezed onto an 8.5" sheet, all in native text mode. And forget it if you had a wide-format printer with 13" paper, at 17CPI you could fit 221 characters per line, equalling about 2.75 lines worth at 10CPI on 8.5" paper. It really allowed a lot of flexibility. Another paper-saving technique was setting the line spacing to 8 lines per inch instead of 6. This decreased the amount of vertical white space between the lines, squeezing more onto a page. Couple that with 12 or 17CPI and you've got a lot to work with. They also allow manual line spacing (I forget the correct setting), but if you choose 17CPI and super- or sub-script, you'd get really fine, small, SHARP printouts, which were great for contracts and fine print on them. So you could do double-wide for the title at the top, 10CPI in the document, and 17 for the fine print. Jazz that all up with high-ASCII line drawing characters and you could print line and bar graphs and make it look really nice. In fact I have an IBM ProPrinter 9-pin narrow carriage that has a broken wire in the printhead. But you can adjust the line spacing to the fine contract print, and it's a great log printer.
jaykay18 I'm not sure why I didn't actually use the text only driver I think I wanted to show it as you would use it for printing more complex things since personally for Physics classes and stuff I have to print out papers with line graphs or other things like that. I wanted to know if it could handle graphics and it certainly can (shown here: orig10.deviantart.net/b70e/f/2015/077/6/b/s1150004_v01_by_mad_king_corduroy-d8m9dnx.jpg ). However like some have said to me already the text only mode would have shown it a bit more as it might have been used back in the day (although windows comes with the drivers built in).
Transcendental Airwaves How did I guess you'd print that out! I wrote another BASIC program that demonstrated all the control codes and character pitches that the original IBM ProPrinter (my first dot matrix) could do. It's really amazing the flexibility that's available, if one could only implement it. When you got to Windows and WYSIWYG, it's a whole different ball game. A quick aside about Windows dot-matrix IBM drivers: Years ago, Microsoft was working with IBM to help them develop OS/2. This was around the Windows 3.1 into 95 days that they had a falling out. If you printed using an IBM driver (to an IBM printer) in 3.1, it printed nice and smooth. Once 95 came out, they totally botched the driver up, and the printer "stutters"; 95 sends part of the line, then more, then more, then more, and the printhead stops, backtracks a drop, keeps printing, backtracks, prints, backtracks, prints. That never happened in 3.1. Other drivers didn't seem to be affected. I couldn't say if that was intentional or not, just something I noticed. But I can tell you, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many other people to tell you the same!
I remember this brand, as I used to own a 24-pin dot matrix printer (Okidata is still in business and, in addition to still carrying impact printers, they now carry laser, ink-jet and multifunction machines (my dad used to get so irritated by the noise of the printer when I was printing out my homework and he would say, "Son, what the fuck is that nose? I'm trying to sleep!" lol).. Basically, how long it takes to print a document with an impact matrix printer depends on the print quality settings (normal, draft or high setting). Impact printers are so obsolete now. Laser printers, ink-jet printers and all-in-one machines (printer, fax, scanner, copier) are more popular than impact printers. Plus, they're very quiet
This was fast back then. Cutting edge technology. Quality was very good with the 24 pin printers. I still use one on windows 10. Very cheap cost per page and no cleaning printhead constantly or replacing cartridges all the time like on my inkjet. ( why i dont use it anymore unless I absolutely need color)
His Computer.................. I have a sudden desire to play Wolfenstein 3D and load up Printshop and print out that naked ascii-art woman that was a part of the Printshop package on that 3.5" printshop floppy...... on the 9 pin printer I had when I was 12. Sooooooo nostalgic.
Keep in mind, these printers are not really designed for printing graphics, and Windows converts the text to graphics before it prints it. You would have to print from a command-line program that sent straight text streams to the printer to show what the printer was really designed for. This is trying to rate how well a fish can climb a tree.
It looks like a great printer, but a 24 pins is really better to have, my fujitsu dl 1100 prints the test page in 42 seconds in "high res", but great video, as always.
Nintenloup wolf Yeah but how could I argue with free, besides I have a Citizen printer that is 24 pin I'll be looking at soon. I got it when I got this one. I just think these things are really freaking cool and besides what's not to like about having enough time to go get a sandwich and coffee while you print out a paper for college. lol
I'm about to purchase OKI Microline 186 and the only cable that comes with is the power cable what cable would I need to hook it up to USB much appreciated
+Drippy Vapes I'm not sure about USB honestly, off the top of my head I would say some sort of converter for Parallel to USB but I don't know if that is going to work.
This is an old video, sure... But try printing a document that doesn't send any graphical data to the printer, (That's what you're doing in these tests)... Like, a plain txt document. Let the printer use it's own fonts. Not only will it print WAY faster, but the quality, and readability will be significantly increased over what you are sending in these tests. These things were designed for text, not graphics. The font may not look as smooth as what you tested, but it will be highly readable.
Is that Packard Bell running 98? I have a Refurbished NEC Ready 7022 with I believe the first Pentium (75 MHz). Recently bought a USB card for it. Brand new from a thrift store. Then my cousin gifted me an old canon starwriter jet 4000 that she got from a friend. Cart is *full* of ink, yet it can't seem to find it.
+Chad robinson Yeah but it's not the computer under the monitor it's another Packard Bell under the desk that has 32MB RAM and a Pentium 200MMX CPU. I wouldn't run Windows 98 on anything less than that to be honest, as it is it can be sluggish at time on this hardware let alone a 75mhz cpu. Your USB card would work fine on a Windows 98 machine with the modern USB drivers that are available to give Win 98 machines capability to use mass storage devices (aka USB thumb drives).
Well yeah assuming you are running Windows 98SE with the USB drivers installed already. Windows 95 and first edition 98 doesn't know what to do with those things at all.
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I just found a Microline 186 at work, and they let me have it. I'm really excited to finally have my own dot matrix printer. I think I'll take it back to university in the fall because it is so small, and then I won't have to deal with the damn university printers. My 186 even has USB, and Windows 10 recognizes it.
This was one of Oki's lower end models, did the same as the others but was meant for a lower duty cycle and wasn't as fast and robust.
That printer does INDEED have DIP switches. There is a small rectangular cover at the back of the top cover, in there are the switches. You can set things like characters sets, lines per page, slashed zeroes, etc.
I have an Oki ML 182, the younger brother to this one. For some reason its power supply has an angry buzz when it's on, but still works. When you send it a full page graphic and the printhead gets hot, it starts printing slower. It doesn't take much to overload the printhead on these. If it gets hotter still it will pause and allow itself to cool. Some higher end models have fans to assist with cooling.
I used an IBM ProPrinter XL wide-format 9-pin throughout school and college. Allowed me to "cheat" in college. When they wanted 15 pages, they got that. But the amount of text was less. I used plain old text, in NLQ. These printers will print fixed-space, so an "I" will take up the same amount of space as a "W". That allowed for less characters per line, stretching the page count slightly. Also, double-spacing on these printers is a little longer vertically than double-spaced text in Word, for example, that also further extended the page count. Pretty sneaky, but it worked! Of course I had an inkjet at the time, but why waste the ink for school stuff? There was nothing like waiting for 15 pages double-strike NLQ at 11:30 at night.
The lowest resolution is there because the printer supports it! The problem is, in Windows, the text you're sending it is too high of a resolution, so it has to down-scale it. When you down-scale that much, it looks like crap. If you use a program of the day with that printer, such as PrintMaster from the 80s, it will look great because it's sending it low-res stuff to begin with, so there's no scaling. The middle setting is about right for most stuff, and provides acceptable print speed, in fact, it would rival some early inkjets (HP QuietJet, cough cough).
I have a video on the PaceMark 3410 printer, it's a wide-format, high-speed 9-pin, it blows away any other printer I've seen. Especially if you send it low-res stuff, it just plain FLIES out of there. Puts these little jobbies to shame, but for back when, for a home printer, these were great.
According to some quick research, this printer allows serial connections as well. It seems there's a door the slides down over the parallel to reveal the serial. I'm only going by some quick reference material. But if that's the case, and you have the space, you can have your Apex and this one hooked up, one parallel, one serial. Windows will even spool jobs to both simultaneously.
I would seriously consider installing the Generic/Text-Only driver as well for the same printer, that way if you have plain text you can send it to the printer in its native format. MUCH faster, and certainly acceptable print quality on NLQ, plus you have the front-panel selectability of Utility or HSD. (Underline is the only feature available in HSD on these, if you remember printer ESC codes and how to use them). A good, old fashioned word processor like Professional Write makes this seamless.
With the right ESC codes (or a good program) you could make super- and sub-scripts like H2O but the 2 would be descended. There was tons of cool stuff you could make them do. I even wrote a program in BASIC when I was like 10 that made use of all the codes. There are print pitches available, more so than what can be selected from panel. You could do double-wide, sometimes double-high, and get all kinds of pitches from 5, 6, 8.5, 10, 12, 17, sometimes even 15 was available (and higher end printers even supported 20).
The pitches were intuitive since it was all fixed-space text. An 8 inch line, at 10 characters per inch would be 80 characters, same as a plain text 80 column screen! Fancy stuff! If you went to 12CPI, you got 96. At 17, you got 136. So that means at 17CPI, you could get the same printout you'd get on 13" green-bar paper, squeezed onto an 8.5" sheet, all in native text mode. And forget it if you had a wide-format printer with 13" paper, at 17CPI you could fit 221 characters per line, equalling about 2.75 lines worth at 10CPI on 8.5" paper. It really allowed a lot of flexibility.
Another paper-saving technique was setting the line spacing to 8 lines per inch instead of 6. This decreased the amount of vertical white space between the lines, squeezing more onto a page. Couple that with 12 or 17CPI and you've got a lot to work with.
They also allow manual line spacing (I forget the correct setting), but if you choose 17CPI and super- or sub-script, you'd get really fine, small, SHARP printouts, which were great for contracts and fine print on them. So you could do double-wide for the title at the top, 10CPI in the document, and 17 for the fine print. Jazz that all up with high-ASCII line drawing characters and you could print line and bar graphs and make it look really nice.
In fact I have an IBM ProPrinter 9-pin narrow carriage that has a broken wire in the printhead. But you can adjust the line spacing to the fine contract print, and it's a great log printer.
jaykay18 I'm not sure why I didn't actually use the text only driver I think I wanted to show it as you would use it for printing more complex things since personally for Physics classes and stuff I have to print out papers with line graphs or other things like that. I wanted to know if it could handle graphics and it certainly can (shown here: orig10.deviantart.net/b70e/f/2015/077/6/b/s1150004_v01_by_mad_king_corduroy-d8m9dnx.jpg ). However like some have said to me already the text only mode would have shown it a bit more as it might have been used back in the day (although windows comes with the drivers built in).
Transcendental Airwaves How did I guess you'd print that out!
I wrote another BASIC program that demonstrated all the control codes and character pitches that the original IBM ProPrinter (my first dot matrix) could do. It's really amazing the flexibility that's available, if one could only implement it. When you got to Windows and WYSIWYG, it's a whole different ball game.
A quick aside about Windows dot-matrix IBM drivers: Years ago, Microsoft was working with IBM to help them develop OS/2. This was around the Windows 3.1 into 95 days that they had a falling out. If you printed using an IBM driver (to an IBM printer) in 3.1, it printed nice and smooth. Once 95 came out, they totally botched the driver up, and the printer "stutters"; 95 sends part of the line, then more, then more, then more, and the printhead stops, backtracks a drop, keeps printing, backtracks, prints, backtracks, prints. That never happened in 3.1. Other drivers didn't seem to be affected.
I couldn't say if that was intentional or not, just something I noticed. But I can tell you, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many other people to tell you the same!
Very good print quality for a 9 pin printer
I remember this brand, as I used to own a 24-pin dot matrix printer (Okidata is still in business and, in addition to still carrying impact printers, they now carry laser, ink-jet and multifunction machines (my dad used to get so irritated by the noise of the printer when I was printing out my homework and he would say, "Son, what the fuck is that nose? I'm trying to sleep!" lol).. Basically, how long it takes to print a document with an impact matrix printer depends on the print quality settings (normal, draft or high setting). Impact printers are so obsolete now. Laser printers, ink-jet printers and all-in-one machines (printer, fax, scanner, copier) are more popular than impact printers. Plus, they're very quiet
This was fast back then. Cutting edge technology. Quality was very good with the 24 pin printers. I still use one on windows 10. Very cheap cost per page and no cleaning printhead constantly or replacing cartridges all the time like on my inkjet. ( why i dont use it anymore unless I absolutely need color)
Most fire stations within the UK have this kind of printer for emergencies
their reliability is undeniable
His Computer.................. I have a sudden desire to play Wolfenstein 3D and load up Printshop and print out that naked ascii-art woman that was a part of the Printshop package on that 3.5" printshop floppy...... on the 9 pin printer I had when I was 12. Sooooooo nostalgic.
Keep in mind, these printers are not really designed for printing graphics, and Windows converts the text to graphics before it prints it. You would have to print from a command-line program that sent straight text streams to the printer to show what the printer was really designed for. This is trying to rate how well a fish can climb a tree.
Man, I wish TV Stations still use these printers for National Weather Service warnings.
Who printer is better LBP-800 laser printer or Lexmark X2350 inkjet?
Mine has the alarm light on and it's not printing. Any idea what might be wrong?
It looks like a great printer, but a 24 pins is really better to have, my fujitsu dl 1100 prints the test page in 42 seconds in "high res", but great video, as always.
Nintenloup wolf Yeah but how could I argue with free, besides I have a Citizen printer that is 24 pin I'll be looking at soon. I got it when I got this one. I just think these things are really freaking cool and besides what's not to like about having enough time to go get a sandwich and coffee while you print out a paper for college. lol
I'm about to purchase OKI Microline 186 and the only cable that comes with is the power cable what cable would I need to hook it up to USB much appreciated
+Drippy Vapes I'm not sure about USB honestly, off the top of my head I would say some sort of converter for Parallel to USB but I don't know if that is going to work.
Lol imagine if you had to print 20 CVs with this. I would lose the will to live and work lol.
would you happen to know does the ml 186 have different pressure pins 4 different shades I'm bout to use it with thermal paper for tattoo stencils
+Drippy Vapes Probably, this one can do different shades for rough graphics so I imagine that would work fine.
This is an old video, sure... But try printing a document that doesn't send any graphical data to the printer, (That's what you're doing in these tests)... Like, a plain txt document. Let the printer use it's own fonts. Not only will it print WAY faster, but the quality, and readability will be significantly increased over what you are sending in these tests. These things were designed for text, not graphics.
The font may not look as smooth as what you tested, but it will be highly readable.
Is that Packard Bell running 98?
I have a Refurbished NEC Ready 7022 with I believe the first Pentium (75 MHz).
Recently bought a USB card for it. Brand new from a thrift store.
Then my cousin gifted me an old canon starwriter jet 4000 that she got from a friend. Cart is *full* of ink, yet it can't seem to find it.
+Chad robinson Yeah but it's not the computer under the monitor it's another Packard Bell under the desk that has 32MB RAM and a Pentium 200MMX CPU. I wouldn't run Windows 98 on anything less than that to be honest, as it is it can be sluggish at time on this hardware let alone a 75mhz cpu. Your USB card would work fine on a Windows 98 machine with the modern USB drivers that are available to give Win 98 machines capability to use mass storage devices (aka USB thumb drives).
Transcendental Airwaves Well, I have a 64 *MB* (Not GB) flashdrive, I'd assume an original FAT format would work properly?
Well yeah assuming you are running Windows 98SE with the USB drivers installed already. Windows 95 and first edition 98 doesn't know what to do with those things at all.
you just got another subscriber!
Thanks. :D
It works is all that matter to me
it prints very fast *30 seconds later*. I'm actually gonna stop it!
not bidirectional
What isn't? The parallel port? It most certainly is.
Bidirectional printing is supported in text mode.