Nice work. (The author is right, that printing ASMR in the video is incredible.)
finaard 42 minutes ago [-]
Back in the early 90s I've discovered that there's not really any backchannel happening when printing to a dot matrix printer over the parallel port. And adding multiple ISA parallel port cards set to same IO address wouldn't cause any hardware issues, but just spit out the same data on all cards.
Which meant, as long as no paper was jamming, I could send data all three printers I had access to at the time could understand, and would save 1/3rd of printing time by having everything spit out in parallel.
My mother (parents bedroom adjacent to mine) did not think that'd qualify as ASMR at 2 in the morning.
ButlerianJihad 14 minutes ago [-]
If you like that printer sound, you’ll love the FLOPPOTRON 3.0
I found a nearly new daisy wheel printer in my storage. Something like this might be a good use of it.
crims0n 6 hours ago [-]
Been thinking of doing something similar, I have an Apple ImageWriter and Atari 1025 sitting in my basement. Does anyone know how long dot matrix ink ribbons last new?
devilbunny 4 hours ago [-]
If they're anything like typewriter ribbons of the era (and why wouldn't they be?), a really long time if you re-ink them periodically. I don't think any of my dad's fabric ribbons ever actually broke, and he typed a lot.
EDIT: Not "professional secretary" levels, but a lot. Enough that he bought a Selectric II for use at home.
bombcar 6 hours ago [-]
Do you mean last as in how long until they dry out or last in how much you can print?
It's usually linear inches of text - which depends on how much you're printing.
crims0n 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah print… reading anything from a few months to a year. Not bad for how cheap the ribbons are.
finaard 40 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like the author cannot tell a serial and a parallel port apart?
aschmelyun 4 hours ago [-]
Author here, I didn't! I've updated the article to reflect the actual port (and have since learned the difference between the two).
Rendered at 19:07:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Which meant, as long as no paper was jamming, I could send data all three printers I had access to at the time could understand, and would save 1/3rd of printing time by having everything spit out in parallel.
My mother (parents bedroom adjacent to mine) did not think that'd qualify as ASMR at 2 in the morning.
https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY?si=roYiok0-UxLVk-8t
EDIT: Not "professional secretary" levels, but a lot. Enough that he bought a Selectric II for use at home.
It's usually linear inches of text - which depends on how much you're printing.